You can change the wallpaper back and forth by scrolling the mouse wheel on top of the indicator icon.

Variety can be controlled from the command line and you can use this to define keyboard shortcuts for the operations you use most often. Run "variety --help" to see all available commands.

You can drop image links or files on the launcher icon to download them and use them as wallpapers. For quicker downloading from a specific site, you can also use clipboard monitoring (see "Manual downloading" tab).

Applying a heavy blurring filter is a great way to get abstract-looking and unobtrusive, yet colorful wallpapers, similar in spirit to the default one in Ubuntu.

Adding your own custom filters is quite easy: open ~/.config/variety/variety.conf in an editor and use the existing filters as an example. Every filter is just a line of options to be passed to ImageMagick's convert command.

When you select an image source, its images are displayed in a window at the bottom of the screen. Click an image there to set is as wallpaper. Right-click to close the window, to modify its appearance or to perform file operations. You can select multiple image sources to create a "merged" thumbnail view of all of them. Please mind that thumbnail view is limited to several hundred randomly selected images.

The indicator has keyboard shortcuts for some of the actions - e.g. show indicator, then press F to copy to favorites, or T to move to Trash.

To enable desktop notifications when the wallpaper changes, uncomment the two lines at the bottom of ~/.config/variety/scripts/set_wallpaper.

If you are using KDE, you need to manually set the file ~/.config/variety/wallpaper-kde.jpg as your desktop background. KDE simply makes it impossible for programs to update the wallpaper without relying on KDE-specific libraries so we have to use a workaround - Variety updates this file, KDE notices the update and refreshes the wallpaper.

If you want to run custom commands every time the wallpaper changes or if you use an alternative desktop environment you should edit the scripts in ~/.config/variety/scripts. There are examples there for various desktop environments.

Color and size options will be relaxed or ignored if there are too few matching images. The color options are still experimental, they take some time to take effect due to intial searching, and are not always very accurate.
