Good Wallpaper Apps For Mac

11-05-2021

Good Wallpaper Apps For Mac

If Apple's macOS wallpaper shifts from day to night shots too slowly for you, replace it with video. With just a little preparation, you could have a movie playing on your desktop all day.
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How to make your own wallpaper

Select a size for your background
Along the right side of the design page you will see a choice of sizes. For the best results, select an option from the “Standard” section. The background maker works best when you choose the “Landscape,” “Slide” or “Widescreen” option.
Pick a theme that grabs attention
Select the “Theme” link at the top of the design page and a choice of themes will appear. The theme you choose can be tweaked with various customization options later, so don’t worry if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for at this stage.
Add an image that brings the wallpaper to life
Add a great photo that will leap from the screen. Click the “Background” link at the top of the page, and choose from a selection of photos via the search option, or upload one of your own.
Stylize text with a range of font options
If you want to add a message to your computer wallpapers and backgrounds, you can give it real personality by utilizing several font options. Make changes to the shape, alignment, spacing, color and font of your text to make your messages come alive.
Download and share your work
Create your own wallpaper, and then share or download it for use on your websites or computer screens. You can send your finished wallpaper to friends by creating a Facebook or Twitter link.

If Apple's macOS wallpaper shifts from day to night shots too slowly for you, replace it with video. With just a little preparation, you could have a movie playing on your desktop all day. AppleInsider shows how to do it and then how to stop yourself going mad in the process.

Some people would struggle to remember what their Mac's desktop wallpaper image was if you asked them. Others might remember but also know that they've long ago covered it up with documents and windows. There are many of us, though, who don't feel that a Mac is really a Mac until we have our preferred wallpaper in front of us.

How you usually change desktop wallpaper on a Mac

If that's you, then you can make any image you like be your wallpaper and macOS makes it easy to add and change them. What it doesn't do is let you set your wallpaper to be a constantly looping video — yet you can get your Mac to do exactly that.

Be sure you want to do this, though. Then as a favor to assorted copyright enforcement agencies around the world, make the video be one that you own the rights. And as a personal favor to us, to anybody sitting next to you, and even to just your future self, please pick a video without any sound.

As well as the video, you will need the latest version of VLC. This free video player is usually used because it's able to play practically any type of movie file where iTunes, for instance, is much more limited.

VLC Video Player

VLC is free, open-source and runs on just about any type of computer you can imagine, and you already know what that means. It's never going to be the slickest Mac app in the world.

You should be able to just drag a video onto an app and know that it will play — and you can do that with VLC. It's just to do what we need now, we have to dig a little into its myriad settings.

Basic settings in VLC Player

Launch VLC and choose Preferences from the VLC menu. A comprehensive series of options pops up but they're not quite comprehensive enough. Look for the Show All button at bottom left and click that.

In the new dialog that appears, click on Video in the left-hand column. Then tick Enable wallpaper mode.

Choose Show All to get the full video settings you need

You'd think that would be that. Get VLC, tick the wallpaper box and run some video. However, nothing will happen.

Instead, having ticked that Enable wallpaper mode box and clicked on Save, you now need to quit VLC.

Quit it, open it again, and now drag a video into VLC's Playlist.

As soon as you do that, your regular wallpaper will be replaced by that video. For the opening moments, you'll also see the filename of the video displayed as a subtitle.

Video wallpaper is gimmicky. However, if you shot or had rights to something like the mesmerising journey around the Earth from space or SlowTV's ten hours of snow falling then you can see it being appealing.

It'd still be distracting, but maybe only a little more than Apple's dynamic desktop. Note that if you did choose a video with sound, you'll be more distracted by how that audio can sometimes go out of sync.

Best Wallpaper Apps For Macbook

Nonetheless, at some point you're going to want to stop it. If you need to temporarily stop it because you can't see what you're looking for on your desktop, just go to VLC and choose Hide VLC from the VLC menu.

Alternatively, just quit VLC. However, the next time you launch it and play a video, it'll run as your wallpaper. So before you quit, go back to Preferences, Show All, Video, untick Enable wallpaper mode and then Save.