[U] Personalization Hub will let you automatically refresh your wallpaper every 10 seconds

Update, May 6th 11:00 AM EST. It looks like this may be a false alarm. The Personalization Hub is, in fact, testing a 10-second wallpaper refresh, but as 9to5Google points out, there’s code that indicates this may only ever remain a developer testing tool. There are currently no plans for Google to offer this feature to users, though we still agree it would be beneficial and fun for Google Photo slideshows!

Original Post, May 4th 12:39 PM EST: The Chromebook Personalization Hub has come a long way as a replacement for the standard ChromeOS Wallpaper picker app. In addition to having Google Photos support, new screensavers like Float on By built-in, new Wallpaper collections like Radiance, and an RGB Keyboard color selector, as well as a looping video creator for your profile image, it’s now receiving the ability to refresh your wallpaper automatically every 10 seconds!

First discovered by Chrome Story and tipped to us by C2 Productions on Twitter, a new Chrome developer flag is inbound and it will allow this very functionality to be added to your Chromebook. At this time, however, this is only meant to be a testbed for developers on the Canary and Dev channels, and the feature will be implemented into ChromeOS Stable at a later date for users.

personalization: Expose wallpaper fast refresh flag

Will allow developers (and users, though this is not the flag’s intent) to enable/disable the wallpaper fast refresh manual testing mode via chrome://flags on Dev/Canary/Unknown channels.

Chromium Repository

A similar wallpaper refresh feature can be seen in the Chrome browser on the New Tab Page customization settings, except instead of being able to refresh your selected wallpaper every 10 seconds, you can choose to automatically refresh it once per day.

ChromeOS already has a daily refresh option, so the idea of allowing users to swap the image out every 10 seconds is odd until you consider the implications of a Google Photos slideshow wallpaper or something similar. Many people have asked for a slideshow feature for their Chromebooks quite a bit in the past, and if we finally see it, it would be a welcome feature.

I continue to be impressed with how much the Personalization Hub is filling out, and I wonder why Google never thought to add so many exciting features in the past. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in a “slideshow” for your Chromebook’s wallpaper background or if you’d rather have one image consistently or per day.