OS X :: Random Wallpaper Feature Enabled?

I really like wallpapers. I have probably several hundred at this point. There are so many I can't pick one, and have the random wallpaper feature enabled. My pictures are arranged simply by their content. I used to have the wallpaper worthy ones on their own, but that got to be a mess. So the wallpaper worthy ones are mixed in with ones that are just plain the wrong dimensions. That makes the shuffle feature hard to use. So I thought of using a smart folder..except you apparently cannot add a smart folder to the wallpaper pref pane.

Well, iPhoto is too much of a pain in the butt for this, although it does the job. So is copying to a dedicated folder. I want them stored on the disk ONCE, in their original folders! My next plan was to use the smart folder to make it easy to get them all in one place anytime, so that I could do a select all followed by a cmd+option-drag to get aliases to ALL of them into a dedicated wallpapers folder. That seems to be working. The wallpaper pref pane WILL see a pile of aliases as the originals wherever they amy be. (I now have to add the word "wallpaper" to most of my wallpaper's spotlight comments to make this work. Automator time).

Ok, method sucessful! If anyone else wants to use the method I described in my second paragraph (pros include the images are properly sorted AND available as a collection for the wallpaper pref pane, without using iPhoto or the files actually getting stored in more than one place on disk)....well, this simple little Service will help. It will add a space followed by the word "wallpaper" to the end of the spotlight comments field in any and all files it's fed. This allows you to easily batch-tag your wallpapers for Spotlight, which makes accessing them, and getting the pile of aliases for the pref pane easy to do.