Every once in a while you realize that you’ve been operating under a massively stupid premise for a long period of time – and then just berate yourself for it. This is one of those times for me. For longer than I care to admit, I’ve been “carrying with me” (through various computer and OS upgrades) an ever-growing set of wallpaper images that I use on my computer at home – which I have randomly change every 20 minutes or so.

When I started doing this, the OS that I had in place (and the utility I was using as a changer) could only properly support 256-colour BMP images. The time has long since passed that this has been a limitation – but, for some obscure reason, I’ve never re-visited the situation.

As a result, my mental “muscle memory” has caused me to download any new and interesting image I’ve found over the years – and then convert it to a 256-colour BMP. It goes without saying that I’ve had to throw some out (because the dithering broke things to such an extent that it was no longer really viewable) and others simply became somewhat “maimed” because the same process resulted in an obvious decrease in quality. This is most often noticed by a pixelation effect – where you see dots in the image, rather than just colour changes.

I no longer need to do this. I haven’t needed to do this for years now. But, for some reason, I’ve continued to do it anyway. I just did a quick Google search on freeware wallpaper changers and came up with a few that I should be able to use without a problem. (Replacing the utility I’ve also kept over the years.)

So, from now on, I can keep the original image without any need to cripple it by decreasing its colour depth. But I can only kick myself for all of the images I have in my “library” that have been crippled for no good reason. No doubt I can find the originals again for some of them. Others, I’ll just have to live with.

Update: I’ve determined that the software I’m going to switch to is Adolix Wallpaper Changer. It seems to do everything I’d like – and I’ve confirmed it has no problem working with high colour JPG images.