Papery

A native wallpaper changer for COSMIC Desktop, built with Rust and libcosmic.

Papery automatically rotates your desktop background using images from multiple online sources, with a system tray icon for quick control.

Features

• Multiple sources — Bing Photo of the Day, NASA APOD, Wallhaven, Google Earth View, local folders
• System tray — Runs in the background with tray controls (next, pause, quit)
• Smart scheduling — Configurable interval with H:M:S precision
• Theme filtering — Filter wallpapers by brightness (light/dark/any)
• Scaling modes — Zoom, Fit, or Stretch
• History & favorites — Browse past wallpapers and save favorites
• Auto-start — Launches on login, rotates wallpapers in the background

Screenshots

Coming soon

Install

From source

# Dependencies (Debian/Ubuntu/Pop!_OS)
sudo apt install cargo cmake just libexpat1-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype-dev libxkbcommon-dev pkg-config

# Build and install
git clone https://github.com/jibsta210/papery.git
cd papery
just install

Arch / CachyOS

git clone https://github.com/jibsta210/papery.git
cd papery
cargo build --release
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/papery /usr/local/bin/papery
sudo install -Dm644 data/dev.papery.CosmicApplet.desktop /usr/share/applications/dev.papery.CosmicApplet.desktop
sudo install -Dm644 data/icons/scalable/apps/dev.papery.CosmicApplet.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/dev.papery.CosmicApplet.svg
install -Dm644 data/dev.papery.CosmicApplet-autostart.desktop ~/.config/autostart/dev.papery.CosmicApplet.desktop

Usage

# Open the settings window
papery

# Run in background only (tray + wallpaper rotation)
papery --bg

• Close the window — Papery continues running in the background via the system tray
• Tray menu — Right-click the tray icon for Next Wallpaper, Pause/Resume, Show Papery, Quit
• Auto-start — On login, papery --bg runs automatically

How It Works

Papery writes to the COSMIC background config (~/.config/cosmic/com.system76.CosmicBackground/), which cosmic-bg picks up via inotify. Downloaded wallpapers are cached in ~/.cache/papery/.

Wallpaper Sources

Source	API Key Required	Description
Bing Photo of the Day	No	Daily curated photos
NASA APOD	No (uses DEMO_KEY)	Astronomy images
Wallhaven	No	Community wallpapers
Google Earth View	No	Satellite imagery
Local Folders	N/A	Your own images

Configuration

Settings are stored via cosmic-config at ~/.config/cosmic/dev.papery.CosmicApplet/v1/.

License

GPL-3.0-only