Over the past few months, I found a new use of the pictures that I have clicked while hiking. I started using them as Zoom virtual backgrounds. If you

Script to change Zoom virtual background every day

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Style Pass

2021-08-17 16:00:05

Over the past few months, I found a new use of the pictures that I have clicked while hiking. I started using them as Zoom virtual backgrounds. If you are anything like me and take a lot of pictures, it can be hard to decide which one looks good. And then I decided to use them all, on different days. Sadly, Zoom does not have this as a built-in feature. And being a Software developer, I had to automate the process of choosing a random Zoom virtual background every day.

Zoom does have an API that I could have used to change my background every day but that seemed like too much effort for this task. Software developers are born lazy, right?

Instead, I found out that the Zoom application creates a copy of the background that gets selected in its preferences folder and references it. The script just takes in a random file and replaces it with this background file. And voila! A different Zoom virtual background is shown. This can then be put in a cron job to be executed every day (or any frequency you prefer) to periodically change the background.

I have put all the images I want to use as backgrounds in a folder in my user directory. Mine is at /zoom/bgpictures/, and that is what I use in the script, but it is a variable that can be changed to whatever you want it to be.