You used Microsoft Research AutoCollage 2008 to create a beautiful set of collages, and now want those to shuffle in your desktop background every 30 minutes? That is made easy by the Windows 7 Slide Show desktop background. By default, AutoCollage will save collages to a single folder under the standard “My Pictures” folder. The instructions below assume you want to use the collages saved to this default location for your desktop background:

1.       Open the properties menu for the Windows 7 desktop and select the menu item Personalize. This will bring up the page “Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization”.

2.       Down on the page, click on the Desktop Background link. This will bring up the page “Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization\Desktop Background”.

3.       Click the Browse… button and on the “Browse For Folder” dialog expand the folder with your account name, and under it expand the “My Pictures” folder. You should then see the folder named “AutoCollage”. Select that folder and press OK.

4.       At this point you will have all the pictures in the AutoCollage folder selected to appear in the background slide show. You may remove some pictures from the slide show and also change other properties, like if the pictures will appear in the name sequence or shuffle, the picture position and the interval for picture changes. After setting the slide show properties press Save changes.

5.       Your selected AutoCollages are now part of the “Unsaved Theme”. Click on the Save Theme link under the “My Themes” section and name the theme.

The collages will now appear in a slide show in your desktop background. That is already great, but there is another Windows 7 feature that makes it easy to share a theme with family and friends. Once you create a theme, just bring up the properties menu –right-clicking over the theme on the theme list – and select the menu item Save theme for sharing. You will then be able to save the theme as a file with the extension .themepack. All you need to do afterwards is to send this single file to friends and family also using Windows 7. All that those receiving your .themepack file have to do is to double-click on it to have the theme added to their gallery, and set as their background slide show!