this has been an issue for a minute but ive been busy so am just now getting to this.

all my machines both 14.2 and current i run xfce on. the background/wallpaper dialog does not allow me to choose specific
directories or files for wallpaper changing. in fact that very dialog
not a single file or directory is "clickable". the only way i can set wallpaper is to right click on a file in my /home/foo and select "set as".

edit: this is xfce4 4.12 both current and 14.2

Yes, that sometimes happened at my end as well (with the 'Folder'-label grayed out in the Settings/Desktop-Background tab). I only cannot remember exactly how it was repaired. Apart from checking permissions of the folder with images you want to use I suggest to open the Settings/Settings Editor, go to the xfce4-desktop section and see whether anything that sets the desktop background has a tick in the 'locked' box. These boxes should be unticked...

hth

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This may not be a useful suggestion but when I tried it just now I found that dialog quite unintuitive so who knows.

Apparently one has to single-click the folder containing the image(s) and then click the Open button in the bottom right of the dialog. That results in going back to the previous dialog now showing previews of the images in that folder, from which you can then select a wallpaper.

The style of dialog, showing that it is looking for "Image files" (which then appear greyed out when you double-click into the folder containing them) does not make that very clear, and I have pretty much unlearned using the "Open" button in this type of dialog so it took me a little bit to figure it out: you might be like me.

See if that helps.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ut-4175594129/

Thanks for the link, also nice to see that somebody else initially had similar thoughts to mine.

Looking at some source files, the main.c patch referenced seems to already have been implemented in current's version of xfdesktop (4.12.4), but not in 14.2's (4.12.3). If wigums is indeed using both 14.2 and current, I would be curious if the behaviour is different - by the way when I made the previous post, I was looking at current.

i am indeed experiencing the problem both on 14.2 (xfdesktop 4.12.3) & current (xfdesktop 4.12.4)

in response to heyjann suggestion to single click, im not even able to do that. all directories and files are grey and unclickable

I had this problem in 14.2, now I'm running -current and it seems that it is solved.
wigums, I remember in 14.2 I didn't apply the patch, instead I did what I posted in that thread,
drag the folder to the left panel of Thunar.

i can right click on a pic and select set as wallpaper. its the xfce4 wallpaper dialog (right click and select desktop settings)that doesnt allow me to select anything

Doesn't help others to help problem solve by repeating the problem as in the first post..
Better to describe what you exactly tried....

Have you checked the settings yet?

Did you try to delete/rename the ~/.cache? Or with a fresh user. Sometimes old stuff needs to be cleared out

I'm also using xfce 4.12 on slackware 14.2 with multiple monitors and had the same issue.

I created a directory in /usr/share/desktop/$USER and place my backgrounds there. I believe I also had to explicitly specify the directory by choosing 'other' in the desktop chooser and then typing the path to the aforementioned dir while the desktop config dialog was displayed on the desktop I was trying to update the background of.

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