If you remember that desktop picture widget for GNOME I wrote about last year, but found it a bit too basic for your personalisation preferences, you weren’t alone.

Another user felt it could lacked enough flexibility, so forked and improved it.

Picture Desktop Widget Remake improves on the original. It lets add multiple picture widgets to your Ubuntu desktop, and assign each one a different folder to pull images from, at random.

Plus, you can set the size, position, border radius and aspect ratio of each widget individually. Each photo frame has its own on/off button in Preferences, so you hide it without deleting it entirely.

I’ve been a sucker for desktop flotsam since 2009® – Clocks, Conky scripts, now playing music controllers, I love that junk. But then: I rarely maximise app windows on my desktop, so there’s blank desktop staring back¹ at me – why not fill it with photos?

Having tried this I can report that it works, but it works with quirks.

When editing a new widget, the existing ones often showed same image (despite different folders being assigned to them). The only way to make them show the right image from their respective pool of images was to turn the whole extension off and back o.

You also can’t set a single image or disable the refresh (an edge case, perhaps). There’s also no way to set how the frame constrains the image if adjusting the aspect ratio. Annoying since the taller and wider frames often crop the images awkwardly.

However, the biggest gotcha is the fact you can’t drag these cute little photos widgets around your desktop to reposition them (no, not even with Ubuntu’s DING disabled). You must manually position each one:

It’d be easier to drag them into place

Despite that, this does what it needs to (most of the time). I didn’t notice a huge uptick in memory usage with this active, but it is not possible to tell how much memory an individual GNOME Shell extension uses as far as I know, so your mileage may vary.

If that hasn’t put you off, and you wish to adorn your workspace like a grandparent’s mantelpiece, you’ll find Picture Desktop Widget Remake on GNOME Extensions, or you can grab the source code from GitHub.

It works with GNOME 46 (Ubuntu 24.04) through 50 (Ubuntu 26.04).

This is one many desktop widget extensions for GNOME Shell. The customisable Desktop Clock widget (which you may spot in my screenshots from time to time – pun intended) also provides text, image weather and command-output widgets.

Still no bouncy red ball revival that I know of, alas. KDE’s got an exclusive lock on that.

1. I also have a glossy display, so blank spaces often reflect my own face – jump scare! ↩︎