Free Live Wallpaper For Mac 2021
From apps that provide them to making your own, we've outlined several ways to get yourself an animated wallpaper desktop below, so you always have something interesting to look at when you're taking a break on your Mac.
Free Live Wallpaper For Mac
You can also customize a dynamic desktop by clicking on the Pictures folder under the Desktop heading, and once it's selected, check the Change picture box. This will have your desktop cycle through all of the images in that folder as your MacBook Pro's live wallpaper.
You can set the time dropdown menu to whatever you want, from a super active live wallpaper background (Every 5 seconds) to one that shifts from image to image slowly (Every 30 minutes).
You can start with our list of the best dynamic Mac wallpaper sites. Then check out options like Satellite Eyes, which makes your wallpaper a satellite image of your current location with a variety of map effects.
Entire apps are dedicated to giving you galleries of animated and dynamic wallpapers to adorn your Mac desktop with. Many of them, like iWallpaper, allow you to simply click on a Live Wallpaper option and hit a Set as wallpaper button, so you don't even need to open System Preferences on your Mac.
To do this, you can upload Live Photos you've taken into dynamic wallpaper sites and apps, like Dynamic Wallpaper Club and Dynaper. Then have the Live Photos become short videos that play on your desktop.
Many live wallpapers you can put on Macs are Quartz animations, and you probably already have some Quartz animations on your machine: the default screensavers. These can be made into animated wallpapers pretty quickly.
Live Desktop delivers a unique experience to your desktop with animated wallpapers in HD quality. Most of them come with integrated sound effects which can be easily turned on or turned off. The application also lets users upload their own videos to create customized live desktop backgrounds.
Wallpaper Collection: As the macOS collection of default wallpapers is quite limited and flat, this criteria was the most important during our test. The best wallpaper app must have a great selection of wallpapers to meet the needs of the most exacting users.
Disclaimer: The opinions on the wallpaper apps listed below were formed after in-depth testing. No developers of the applications mentioned in this article have any influence on our testing process.
All photos are in HD 4K quality which makes a big difference if you have a Retina display. In addition to high-end resolution, every wallpaper in the app looks stunning and will meet the standards of the pickiest users.
The Favorites tab is a collection of wallpapers you like the most. Just click on the star icon every time you see a photo or collection you want to add to Favorites, and they will always be close at hand whenever you need them again. The Favorites tab is available only for registered users who bought a full version of the app.
Unsplash Wallpapers is the official app of Unsplash API, one of the largest open collections of high-resolution photos made by a community of talented photographers. The biggest part of the wallpapers is the breathtaking pics of nature and urban landscapes.
With Irvue, you can choose your preferred image orientation (landscape, portrait, or both), change the wallpaper automatically according to your time preferences, download photos to computers, and set the same background on multiple displays. It also provides auto-adjustment of the macOS theme depending on the current wallpaper.
Searching for unusual wallpapers for your Mac? Satellite Eyes is a free macOS application that changes desktop background automatically depending on your location. Developed by Tom Taylor, the app sets the satellite view of your current location as the wallpaper using the maps from MapBox, Stamen Design, Bing Maps, and Thunderforest.
Live Wallpaper HD & Weather will use your current location to display the most accurate weather forecast. Apart from the wallpaper style, in the Preferences section, you can also choose a weather window and clock widget style. The application also lets you specify how often you want the desktop background to change.
If you want to have weather and time-related data on your desktop all the time, then the Live Wallpaper HD & Weather app deserves your attention. Although the application is free to download, it has a limited feature set. A full ad-free version with an unlocked collection of live wallpapers and other upgraded features costs $3.99.
The app offers awesome desktop wallpapers that reflect the time of day depending on your current location. You can also adjust time preferences to meet your schedule and lifestyle by customizing sunrise and sunset times and durations. The app is fully compatible with macOS Mojave Dynamic Desktop as well as macOS 10.11 or later.
24 Hours Wallpapers has a huge collection of wallpapers of both city and nature landscapes at HD resolution. Here you can find both Fixed View (photos captured from one perspective) and Mixed (combination of different views and photos) wallpapers. While Fixed View wallpapers show you one location throughout the day, Mixes display one place or region from different locations staying synced with time.
What is really impressive about 24 Hours Wallpapers is the quality of their themes. There are 58 wallpapers, each of which contains about 30-36 still images at 5K 51202880 resolution with up to 5GB of images available. The app lets you preview, download and set the HD wallpapers identifying the best resolution based on your current display. All photos were professionally captured specifically for the app.
The application also provides multi-monitor support and integrates directly with system wallpapers. As 24 Hours Wallpapers uses a series of still images, there is a minimal battery and CPU drain. You can buy the app on the App Store at $6.99.
Dynamic Mac wallpapers first arrived with macOS Mojave. With macOS Ventura, there are now more built-in dynamic options than ever before. These wallpapers change based on time of day (the effect applies in both light mode and dark mode). That means the visual effect can be used without changing your system appearance. Here is how to do it:
Ever since the macOS became the multimedia powerhouse it is today, visuals have been a strong suit of the operating system. With the release of macOS X Mojave, Apple brought out the glorious Dynamic Wallpapers, which shifted the landscape based on the time of the day. Thanks to the unprecedented popularity same glorious dynamic wallpapers are compatible with macOS Big Sur update too. As stunning as the native wallpapers on macOS with every new version can be, you might find seeing the same aesthetic elements, as stunning as it may be, a bit boring.
By default, you are limited to the number of wallpapers available for the system to just a handful, which would make you want to find a few surreal ones of our own. But where can you find wallpapers and desktop backgrounds for your Mac computer that are good enough to rival the pieces of visual art that Apple crafts with the help of world-renowned photographers?
Developed with the minimalist design in mind, the Wallpaper Wizard 2 app comes from MacPaw, which is already an established development studio. We enjoyed the lightweight wallpaper app, which comes with the finesse you would expect from native macOS apps, and a gargantuan collection of visually pleasing desktop backgrounds under the hood.
Bringing out the best of the Retina HD display that makes the MacBook and the iMac such an eye-candy, Wallpaper Wizard 2 gives you an ever-updating catalog of all sorts of wallpapers, ranging across the spectrum of nature, space, architecture, colors, seasons, and everything in between.
The best wallpapers for Mac are not in short supply, we could not find a whole lot of wallpaper apps for macOS that offer you dynamic wallpapers Apple ships the operating system with. We found the ability to see the day pass by with the wallpaper reflecting it, quite pleasant, which is exactly what Jetson Creative strives to offer with the 24 Hour Wallpaper app.
Available as both, an app and a standalone bundle of wallpapers too, you will find the pricing model of 24 Hour Wallpaper as the only confusing part about it. We found everything else about the wallpaper app to be straightforward, with the wallpapers designed with the same craftsmanship that you come to expect only from the award-winning photographers that Apple hires for its official dynamic wallpapers.
Built in 5K HD resolution to keep your eyes fixated on the desktop for hours, the 24 Hour Wallpaper app features more than 80 different scenic spectacles to choose from. Apart from the three that are offered for free to give you a little taste of the goodness (Big Sur, Miami, and Earth from ISS), the app packs a whole lot more in 51202880 resolution.
Hologram Desktop is a cool app we recently discovered in the Mac App Store.The app transforms your Mac desktop with 5 million scenic wallpapers from Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels. You get five-preloaded themes that you can instantly apply and use, then would have to download more wallpapers from built-in three top image providers above.
This software is not just about wallpapers, but more about a combination of wallpapers and widgets. Why? It allows you to blend your own creativity into it by neatly arranging the shortcuts and icons on wallpapers you fetched. The app comes over 50 widgets now, that lets you add the weather, date and time, moon phase, system information, inspirational quotes, jokes, and lots of other stuff to appear from your homescreen. You can even customize Widgets with tons of settings directly from the app.
Hologram Desktop supports Macs running macOS 10.15 Catalina or higher. It comes in Free and Pro versions. The Free version comes with 10 widgets and is limited to 5 wallpaper downloads per month, while Pro version comes with unlimited wallpaper downloads, all available widgets, 25 beautiful pre-built pro themes, and lets you save your wallpapers to your own folders. You can buy the app for $9.99 from the Mac App Store.