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Feature Request: In Desktop Settings show thumbnails of wallpapers in subfolders of 'backgrounds' folders and add background folder pathing system.

Issue Description

This is similar to issue/9 but a hacky shell script user created symlinks seems like a bad long term solution.

When configuring the desktop background only one specific folder's contents are displayed at a time and the user must choose which folder using a typical dialog. While this provides the necessary functionality it leaves the user experience lacking. I think that making a few small changes would result in a much improved user experience by providing a relatively simple efficient interface for management and discoverability of wallpapers on a system and user level and unifying the overall feel of UI management in xfce. This is my perception of the deficiencies of the current system followed by the changes I propose to address them. Most people could just skim down to proposed changes.

Lacking Discoverability

The user is expected to be aware of the exact location of the wallpaper they want to select. If a user doesn't know that there are others located in another folder then they probably wont look there to find them leaving the user with an artificially reduced selection.

Inefficient User Interface

In general the open folder dialog requires navigating the entire filesystem to a specific folder. the inclusion of 'right-click > Set as wallpaper' makes this interface redundant and cumbersome since a wallpaper can already be set easily in Thunar. The open folder dialog is the same as all the others in xfce. If a user wants to select from a system level installed wallpaper after using a wallpaper somewhere in their home directory it is unlikely that they will have quick access to /usr/share/backgrounds/ unless they are frequently accessing this location. Additionally the total number of wallpapers in a given folder tends to be small. My fresh install of xfce on arch came with 11 total wallpapers and the Arch wallpaper pack came with 23. The current UI could easily handle over 100 thumbnails with out becoming overwhelming so there is no reason to not include all of them at once for selecting from. If you actually want all the available wallpapers to show up as options then you have to create symlinks for each one all in one directory and this directory has to be maintained. The directories that have been selected previously are forgotten on the next run so you cant easily go back to another folder.

Unintuitive User Interface

I would generally expect that if A user installs backgrounds system wide that all of them would be visible simultaneously when opening the background configuration by default. This is how color themes, icon packs, display manager themes, cursor themes, and screensavers all work but for some reason desktop background is is different. I would expect that all supported images located in "predictable" locations would be presented as options.

Proposed Changes

Show thumbnails of wallpapers in subfolders of 'backgrounds' folders and add backgrounds folder pathing system.

  • Add recursion search depth option. Even if this is the only thing changed at one level deep this would address most of my concerns and ease symlink management.
  • Ideally a user should be able to use "the usual linux file structure" and have a pathing system parse multiple locations for backgrounds placed in "predictable" locations. I can think of several reasons a user might decide to place images they want to use as wallpapers in any of: BACKGROUNDS=("~/Backgrounds" "~/.backgrounds" "~/.local/share/backgrounds" "/usr/local/share/backgrounds" "/usr/share/backgrounds")
  • The current functionality should be maintained. Users can think of other less "predictable" locations ~/Downloads, ~/Desktop, ~/Pictures
  • Possibly add options to sort the thumbnails by name, subfolder, or other properties. This is beyond my expectations but would be nice.

Steps to Reproduce Issue

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Expected Behavior

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Additional Information

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Environment & Versions

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