Even when I’m not watching anything on my Chromecast, I still enjoy having it on and sitting idle waiting for me to fling something up on the TV. The reason why is because Google has it set up to play through a slideshow of some really wonderful photography images. Every single one of them is really cool. They make great wallpaper images for the backdrop on the big screen, but they would also make great wallpapers for your other devices. There are a couple of ways to do this, one of which we already touched on last week. We’ll get into that in a bit. First, let’s talk about how you can get your hands on every single images to date that Google has used in the “ready to cast” screen for the Chromecast.
If you wanted to get a hold of the images and use them for wallpapers on either your smartphone or tablet, or even your desktop or laptop, a user over at GitHub named dconnolly was nice enough to put up handy little file package filled with all of these images. Literally every single one currently. That is, until Google adds more, which will probably warrant an update of the files. Until then though you can get your hands on all of them and once you do you can use them as your wallpaper on any device you like. These are the same “full resolution” images used for the Chromecast “ready to cast” screen, so there’s no worry of the image not fitting displays correctly. You can even find ways to set up the wallpaper to cycle through all of the images just like the Chromecast does, and since the images cycle through at random, there’s no rhyme or reason and it doesn’t matter how you set them up.
This brings us to our next option for using the Chromecast images as your wallpaper. This options is limited to Android devices, and won’t work for the Desktop as it’s through an Android App. You may remember last week we did a “Top 10 Muzei Extensions” list. For those that don’t know, Muzei is a great little Live Wallpaper app you can download if you have an Android device running Android 4.2 and up. The app cycles through wallpapers at random, but the best part is the extensions that you can add in, which let you change where the images are coming from to use as the wallpapers. One of the extensions we added to the Top 10 was “Cast For Muzei” which pulls the images directly from the feed that Google uses for Chromecast, making it super simple to have the images as wallpapers and have them cycle in the same way. If you want these images as your wallpaper, select whichever one of these options seems better fit for your situation, and have at it.