Quick and dirty wallpaper concatenation

By Ghost on Wednesday 15 October 2008 20:42
Category: Linux, Views: 2198

It took me a while, but I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a larger, 22-inch screen. Although my brother still beats me in screen estate, I feel confident I can settle for an additional 22" for the next four or five years.

I want to use both my monitors together and to do that, I have used Nvidia's TwinView setting. This setting merges the screen estate of both monitors into one large virtual desktop with a resolution of 2960x1050. This is a problem for some wallpapers, though, especially the ones that are designed for one specific resolution. The best way to use these is by combining them in one large image using an image manipulation tool.

Of course I could use the GIMP for such an occasion, but it is way too much work aligning both wallpapers by hand. And why should I when tools like ImageMagick are at my disposal?

montage wallpaper_1280.jpg wallpaper_1680.jpg \
             -tile 2x1 -geometry "1680x1050+0+0" \
             -mode concatenate wallpaper.jpg

The parameters of montage break down as followed:
• -tile 2x1 tells the program to tile the images in a 2x1 grid.
• -geometry "1680x1050+0+0" sets the preferred size of one tile to 1680x1050px with a border of 0px, effectively resizing images that are too large.
• -mode concatenate tells montage to just concatenate the tiles instead of framing them.

The only thing I have to do is supply images with the correct sizes and montage takes care of the rest.