The Smile Desktop is changing, yet again

This morning I went to the Smile website to see what new images were available today and I was greeted with a landing screen indicating that I was logged out. It’s not a big deal but it made me wonder what was up since I have my browser set to keep me logged in so if I’m logged out it generally means there’s something new with the service. Earlier this year I had to log in again and discovered that they were no longer automatically pushing the new wallpaper images to their software client, which isn’t that big a deal to me since I can download the images I want fairly easily. But today I noticed their little robot with an important message.

I clicked the link and found some additional information about the change. It wasn’t much additional information, but it did explain why the change was being made. The first question on the page asks why they’re no longer publishing professional photos and their answer starts with this

We believe that enjoying professional photos on your wallpaper and screensaver is a very different service than creating an easily shared photo library, which is the vision behind Smile.

The question page goes on to let us know that there will still be some daily images, but that Smile will become a mobile photo sharing app. Unfortunately they’re not clear whether there will be a desktop app or not, so we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with. It does sound like there will be an update to the desktop software with new images available daily, but no archive to let you get images you missed on previous days.

Once I see what they roll out on 1 July I’ll share what I find. Until then I recommend anyone who likes the Smile images make sure they download the ones they like. If you’re a Linux user who is having problems with the desktop software for any reason, such as the fact that the wi-fi network I’m on seems o be blocking the port that the software uses to phone home and get the desired images, you may want to try clicking on the image to see the full picture, then right clicking on the image and saving it that way. I like to open it in a new tab so I can see the identification in the lower right corner and save the image with that information as the file name, but you may want to do something different. I can’t guarantee this will be possible once they roll out the updated software on 1 July.