Sometimes, the smallest thing can make a difference. I wouldn’t have guessed that a program running in the background of my work PC to change my desktop images every hour would have made my workday more fun.

But The Webshots Desktop does exactly that. I now have a collection of I-don’t-know-how-many images of seashore scenes, mountaintop views, forest paths, and bucolic villages from around the world. Seeing a new one, at random, takes a bit of the ennui out of the workday. The Webshots Desktop is downloadable from http://www.webshots.com, and is easy to install. Getting new images from the website is easy too.

But here’s a tip that may not be obvious. You can use The Webshots Desktop to display any pictures you have on your computer harddrive. This means you can find pictures on other websites (I like www.trekearth.com), use the browser to save them to your computer, and then make them into a Webshots Desktop image. To perform this feat: click on the “My Computer” tab in The Webshots Desktop. Navigate to where the folder on your computer’s harddrive that contains the images that you want to use for Webshots Wallpaper. Select an image and click “Add to WP and SS” (which means add to the wallpaper and screensaver collection”). You then select a category and title for the image and you’re done. I’ve added lots of pictures to my Webshots collection this way. Moral of the story: you are not limited to the pictures that are on the Webshots website.