In Mac OS X desktop pattern and picture organization seems a lot more confusing and inaccessible then it did in OS 9. In the Desktop System Preference Pane there is a pull down menu of the few collections that Apple has pre-installed on your computer. What about your own collections? There is a very simple way to add your own collections to this menu so accessing your own pictures can become a breeze.
1. Open your hard drive that has OSX installed and navigate to System/Library/PreferencePanes
2. Locate DesktopPictures.prefPane and at the same time Control + Click to open up the “Show Package Contents Dialog”
3. A window should spawn that will reveal a folder named “Contents.” Navigate from to the Resources folder from the Contents folder.
4. In order to successfully due this simple alteration a simple text editor such as BBEdit should be used. BBEdit Lite is freeware and can be downloaded from Bare Bones Software.
5. Now for the fun part! In the Resources folder there is an item called “Collections.plist.” Drop this onto BBEdit (or your other text editor of choice). (You may want to make a backup of the original item before you make any changes.)
6. You can either add more collections in addition to Apple’s by copying and pasting one of the desktop pattern blurbs, or just modifying the identifier (i.e. what you want the folder to be named as in the Desktop menu) as well as the path (where the folder is located).
7. After you have made all necessary changes save the file as a text file named Collections.plist
8. You will need to gain access to root either through logging into as root user or through the terminal. Then simply copy your new Collections.plist and enjoy!
