Rotating artwork for Playnite. Give a game more than one cover or background and watch them change.
📥 Install · ⚙️ Settings · 🎨 Theme guide · 📝 Changelog
A library that never looks the same twice. ImageRotater keeps a collection of covers and backgrounds for each game and shows a different one every time you visit — or cycles through them while you linger.
- Backgrounds and covers rotate on their own. A new picture each time you land on a game, or a slideshow that changes every few seconds while you stay.
- Four places to find art. Steam's own store art and trailers, SteamGridDB, web image search, and YouTube — one search dialog with filters and a live preview, one click to download.
- Smooth changes. Crossfade, fade through black, fade through white, or a clean cut, chosen separately for covers and backgrounds. Same look in Desktop and Fullscreen.
- Works with every theme. Nothing to configure, nothing for a theme to add.
- Your art is safe. Whatever a game had before joins the rotation instead of being replaced, and one click puts everything back the way it was.
- Only the games you choose. Nothing happens to a game until you give it artwork.
- And, in supporting themes, animated artwork. GIF and MP4 covers and backgrounds play in place — the selected game, or every tile at once. Playnite cannot play video on its own, so this one needs a theme built for ImageRotater (or for BackgroundChanger); everything above does not.
- Install the extension and open a game's right-click menu.
- ImageRotater → Backgrounds → Search images online… (or Covers).
- Pick a few results and download them. That's it — the game rotates from now on.
Rotation needs two or more images per game — with one there is nothing to change to, so no transition plays. A game's own artwork counts: it joins the rotation on first use, so a game that already has a cover needs only one download; a game with none needs two.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| Add artwork files… | Use images or video you already have |
| Search images online… | Steam, SteamGridDB, the web and YouTube, with preview |
| Download from SteamGridDB (automatic) | Grab the best match without asking |
| Open folder | See this game's artwork |
| Remove all | Take this game out of the rotation |
Optional extras. Everything below unlocks a feature; the extension works without any of it.
| Item | What it unlocks |
|---|---|
| SteamGridDB API key | The SteamGridDB tab. Free from steamgriddb.com → Preferences → API. |
| ffmpeg | Converting GIFs to MP4, repairing videos, and YouTube downloads. |
| yt-dlp | The YouTube tab. |
| deno | Needed alongside yt-dlp for YouTube. |
Leave a path blank if the tool is already on your system path.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Enable rotation | On | The master switch. |
| Enable debug logging | Off | Writes a log for bug reports. |
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Transition (Animation page) | Crossfade | How one background gives way to the next. |
| Letterbox odd-shaped backgrounds | On | Ultrawide and square art sits on a blurred, screen-shaped canvas of itself instead of being stretched. |
| Level background sizes | On | Keeps the blur consistent when backgrounds of different sizes swap. |
| When a game has several | Pick once per session | Or pick again every time you select the game, or always show the same one. |
| Slideshow | Off | Change the background every N seconds while a game stays selected. |
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Rotate cover art | Off | Turn on to rotate box art too. |
| Play animated covers on every tile | Off | Otherwise only the selected game's cover moves. Best left off for very large video libraries. |
| Transition (Animation page) | Crossfade | How one cover gives way to the next. |
| When a game has several | Pick once per session | As for backgrounds. |
| Slideshow | Off | Change the cover every N seconds while a game stays selected. |
One-click maintenance for everything ImageRotater holds: convert all GIFs to MP4, convert all JPEGs to PNG, repair videos that show as black tiles, repair broken artwork links, or reset the library to the original art.
Settings > Library > Migration > Import artwork from BackgroundChanger copies every cover and background you gave that plugin into ImageRotater, game by game. Nothing of BackgroundChanger's is moved or deleted, and running it again only adds what is new. Disable BackgroundChanger afterwards - the two cannot run together.
Rotating stills need nothing from a theme. Animated covers and backgrounds are not something Playnite can show by itself: a theme adds one line next to its existing artwork element and the extension does the rest. The theme guide shows exactly where, with a worked example.
- Playnite 10.57 or newer, Desktop or Fullscreen
- Windows with .NET Framework 4.6.2
- Optional: ffmpeg, yt-dlp and deno for conversions and YouTube; a free SteamGridDB API key for that source
Use MP4 for video. Cannot run at the same time as BackgroundChanger.
Download the .pext from Releases and open it with Playnite, or drag it onto
the Playnite window.
Turn on Enable debug logging in settings and attach ImageRotater.log from
%AppData%\Playnite\ExtensionsData\72b7d457-0621-429b-8368-665bc53ff896\ to your report.
dotnet build -c Release
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts/package_extension.ps1Tests: dotnet test -c Release. Branding: scripts/build_branding.ps1.
MIT — see LICENSE.