Wallper 1.4: Shuffle, Global Search and a Rebuilt Interface

By January the library had grown past the point where browsing it was a reasonable way to find anything.

That is a good problem, and it is still a problem. Thousands of wallpapers arranged in a grid means the ones you would love are statistically unlikely to be the ones you ever scroll past, and picking a single favourite to stare at for three months was never really the point of having a library.

Wallper 1.4 is the release that responds to that. Two features do most of the work: Shuffle, which stops you having to choose, and Global Search, which helps when you want to.

Some features here require macOS 26 or later.

Shuffle

Shuffle rotates your wallpaper automatically, and it can be opened straight from the menu bar.

It draws from your Liked and Downloaded wallpapers rather than the whole catalog, which is the detail that makes it work. Random selection from thousands of files gives you something you actively dislike within a day. Random selection from wallpapers you already chose gives you variety without risk.

You can set a switch interval, and transitions between wallpapers are seamless rather than a visible cut. On macOS 26 Shuffle can rotate your lock screen too, so the whole machine changes together rather than in pieces.

For rotation behaviour and intervals, see automatically changing wallpapers.

Global Search

Search now runs across wallpapers, tags and colours.

Colour search is the one that turns out to matter most, because it maps onto how people actually decide. Nobody thinks "I want a wallpaper about mountains." They think their desk feels cluttered and they want something darker, or they have just switched to light mode and everything looks wrong against it. Searching by colour matches that intent directly.

Previews load asynchronously as results come in, and you can install a wallpaper straight from the results without opening it first.

The Bottom Control Panel and Menu Bar

A new control panel handles whatever is currently playing: pause or switch instantly, set wallpapers per display, toggle the lock screen wallpaper, and like something without leaving what you are doing.

The menu bar was fully redesigned around the same idea. You can like wallpapers, open Shuffle, and pause or switch video per display without opening the main window at all.

This is the payoff of the menu bar architecture from 1.0.8. Almost everything you do regularly is now reachable without the app window existing. More on multi-display behaviour in multi-monitor setup and on the displays support page.

Settings, Rebuilt

Settings moved to a system-style layout and gained the things a mature app needs.

Cache management is now granular, covering preview cache, video cache and lock screen cache separately, with size limits and a shortcut to the system cache folder. There is an installed wallpapers list with delete, so reclaiming disk space no longer means guessing. See how much space wallpapers take.

There is a display overview with per-display controls including pause and disable, faster display and device loading, and device-specific icons so a list of monitors is readable at a glance.

Licence information is clearer and better protected, and a bug showing incorrect licence data is fixed. You can also export logs, reopen the welcome screen, check the app version, and reach a new Support tab directly. Exportable logs matter more than they sound: a problem report with logs attached is usually a fixed bug, and one without is usually a conversation.

Lock Screen on macOS 26

Switching wallpapers no longer requires manually reselecting them on the lock screen, which was the most tedious part of living with the feature.

Lock screen previews are fixed, caching was added so it does not re-fetch what it already has, and there is a setup overlay in the main view that walks through configuration rather than leaving you to find it.

Background on why this is macOS 26 only is in 1.3.5.1, and the full walkthrough is in how to set a live wallpaper on your Mac lock screen.

My Library and Sharing

My Library was redesigned, and you can now rename wallpapers in it, which sounds trivial until you have four files called render_final_2.

Wallpapers can also be shared via public link during installation, so sending someone a wallpaper is now a link rather than an explanation.

Video publishing moved to the website, where there is room for it. It now detects video colour and type automatically and supports publishing multiple videos at once, which was the single most requested change from people uploading in volume. The upload page covers the current flow.

Startup and Architecture

Startup is significantly faster. Licence connection is asynchronous instead of blocking, and user and app data load in parallel rather than in sequence, which is most of the improvement right there.

The interface was rewritten entirely, moving UI loading onto a new backend architecture with better async handling and multithreading. There is also a new onboarding flow and a redesigned licence key modal.

A full interface rewrite is a strange thing to celebrate, because when it goes well nobody notices anything except that the app feels quicker. That is the intended outcome. This release is the foundation the next several are built on.