Ewen

making a Studio Ghibli wallpaper carousel (for MacOS)

Studio Ghibli have dropped almost 1k movie stills into the public domain (and counting) over the last few months. I turned this into a rotating desktop wallpaper for my Mac, and thought I’d share the (tiny) process.

First, make (AKA mkdir) a folder in which to store the images via a terminal session, then navigate to that directory (with cd). You can edit the command below to do this, dropping in a suitable file path replacement for you.

mkdir /Users/Ewen/Pictures/ghibli
cd /Users/Ewen/Pictures/ghibli/

Before starting the d/l, you will need wget. Get Homebrew if you haven’t already, then install wget via brew.

brew install wget

This next part comes courtesy of a comment under a HN post following the news. I hadn’t seen the curly braces {} trick before, which is a neat way to expand a numeric series in the shell. Anyway, this step will grab the whole image drop (as of 20th November, 2020) and will probably take an hour or so.

wget --random-wait --timestamping http://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/{ged,chihiro,karigurashi,ponyo,kokurikozaka,marnie,kaguyahime,kazetachinu,howl,baron,ghiblies,yamada,mononoke,mimi,tanuki,umi,porco,majo,totoro}{001..050}.jpg

Once you have the pics, all that’s left to do is to start up the wallpaper carousel:

Screenshot of MacOS desktop & screen saver selections

That’s it!

Screenshot of new desktop wallpaper