Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

less than 1 minute read

This is real simple. iNaturalist has an open API, so you don’t need to sign up for a key or anything to use it for basic things. iOS shortcuts lets you do a lot of basic scripting, maybe too much if like me you have a tendency to go down that particular type of rabbit hole.

This shortcut gets your current location and queries iNaturalist for the nearest recent research-grade observation with a photo. Downloads the full-resolution image, overlays the species common name and date observed, then sets it as your wallpaper.

Right now the text overlay is ugly and hard to read, so that could be updated in the future.

I’ve set this to run as an automation based on time of day. It would be great to set it for some other events like connecting to Carplay or changin focus mode.

Link to download: RoutineHub • Set wallpaper to most recent iNaturalist observation in your area

a screenshot of a wallpaper set to a juniper bush

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