How to change the wallpaper on your Mac

The fastest way to change your wallpaper on Mac is through System Settings. Open the Apple menu in the top-left corner, choose System Settings, then click Wallpaper in the sidebar. Pick any of Apple's built-in pictures and the desktop updates instantly.

To use your own image, scroll to the Photos section or click Add Photo, then select a file from your library or a folder. Under the fill options, choose Fill Screen, Fit to Screen, or Center so the picture sits correctly on your display.

Dynamic wallpapers are Apple's desktop pictures that shift automatically as the day goes on: brighter in the morning, darker at night. In System Settings → Wallpaper, choose a wallpaper from the Dynamic Desktop category, then set it to Automatic so it follows your local time, or lock it to a Light or Dark still.

Dynamic wallpapers add gentle variety, but they only use Apple's own scenes. If you want the desktop to change through your own images or clips instead, that's where a dedicated wallpaper app comes in.

Since macOS Sonoma, Apple's Aerial screen savers (slow, cinematic drone footage) can double as a moving desktop wallpaper. When your Mac wakes, the aerial video smoothly settles into a matching still image, so the desktop feels alive without being distracting.

Open System Settings → Wallpaper, choose a category like Aerials, Landscape, or Cityscape, and enable "Show as screen saver" if you want the same clip in both places. It is the closest built-in option to a live wallpaper, but it is still limited to Apple's video library, not your own clips.

macOS has no built-in way to set an MP4 or MOV file as your desktop background. Apple limits motion wallpaper to its own aerial library. To use your own footage, you need a live-wallpaper app. Walyro is a macOS 14+ app built for exactly this: it turns local video files into live wallpaper and keeps everything offline.

Install Walyro, then import a clip from Finder (MP4, MOV, and M4V all work) or start with one of the built-in starter videos. Preview how it sits behind the desktop with Fit, Fill, or Crop, choose which display it plays on, and set it. Playback stays muted by default, and you can pause, resume, or clear it from the menu bar whenever you need a quiet screen.

On a multi-display Mac, System Settings shows a separate wallpaper thumbnail for each screen. Click the display you want, then choose its picture, so your main monitor and a second screen can run completely different backgrounds.

The same idea applies to live wallpaper. With Walyro you can send one video or Playlist to your MacBook display and a different one to an external monitor, and pause either screen without touching the other.

If your new wallpaper looks blurry, the source image is smaller than your screen. Use a picture at your display's native resolution (for example 3024×1964 on a 14-inch MacBook Pro, or 5120×2880 on a 5K display) so it stays sharp.

If a dynamic wallpaper won't shift with the time of day, turn on Location Services in System Settings → Privacy & Security. And if the Add Photo option is missing, check that you're on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, since the Wallpaper settings layout changed in that release.