How to Change Wallpaper on Mac

Changing the wallpaper is usually the first thing anyone does with a new Mac. It is also more capable than most people realize: macOS can use your own photos, rotate through a folder automatically, play Apple's slow-motion aerials, and, with the right app, run a real video behind your icons.

Quick answer: right-click an empty spot on the desktop, choose Change Wallpaper, and pick an image. Everything beyond that, from rotating folders to live video, is below.

This guide covers all of it, from the basic two-click change to live wallpapers, in plain steps. Where a topic deserves its own deep dive, you will find a short answer here and a link to the full guide.

How to Change Your Wallpaper on Mac

The fast way:

1. Right-click anywhere on an empty desktop and choose Change Wallpaper.

2. macOS opens System Settings, Wallpaper with your current wallpaper at the top.

3. Click any image in the gallery below and it applies instantly.

That is the whole process. You can also get there the long way: Apple menu, System Settings, Wallpaper.

One thing worth knowing up front: macOS remembers a wallpaper per desktop Space and per display. If you use several Spaces and the wallpaper looks unchanged after a swipe, you changed it on a different Space, not the one you are looking at.

How to Set Your Own Photo as a Mac Wallpaper

Three ways, depending on where the photo lives.

From System Settings. Open System Settings, Wallpaper, click Add Photo (or Add Folder or Album for a whole set), pick your image, done. This is the most reliable route and it keeps the photo listed for later.

From Finder. Right-click any image file and choose Set Desktop Picture at the bottom of the menu. Fastest way when the file is already in front of you.

From Photos. Select a picture in the Photos app, click the Share button, choose Set Wallpaper.

For the best result, use an image at least as large as your display's resolution. On a Retina MacBook or a 4K monitor that means a 4K image; anything smaller gets stretched and goes soft. If you need material, our gallery has thousands of 4K wallpapers, and every one of them can also be saved as a still.

How to Use Dynamic Wallpapers on Mac

Apple ships two kinds of moving-ish wallpapers, and the names confuse everyone.

Dynamic Desktop pictures shift through the day: the same scene at dawn, noon and night, matched to your local time. They are photos with a schedule, not video. You will find them in the Dynamic Wallpapers section of the Wallpaper settings.

Aerials are the slow drone shots from the screensaver. Choose one as your wallpaper and it plays a few seconds of motion when you log in, then settles into a still frame. Beautiful, but the motion is a greeting, not a background: for most of the day it is a static image.

Neither one loops continuously. If what you actually want is a wallpaper that keeps moving while you work, that is a live wallpaper, and macOS does not ship one; the video section below covers how to get it.

How to Change Wallpapers Automatically

macOS can rotate wallpapers on its own:

1. Open System Settings, Wallpaper and click Add Folder or Album.

2. Point it at a folder of images or a Photos album.

3. Turn on rotation and pick the interval: every hour, every day, or on each login. There is also a shuffle option so the order stays fresh.

This works well for photo collections. For live wallpapers, the equivalent is Wallper's Shuffle, which rotates video wallpapers from your liked and downloaded sets on a schedule, with seamless transitions, straight from the menu bar. It arrived in Wallper 1.4, and automatic wallpaper changes covers the details.

How to Set Different Wallpapers on Multiple Monitors

Short answer: open System Settings, Wallpaper with both displays connected, and a separate preview appears for each one. Click the display you want, pick its image, repeat for the other.

For live wallpapers per display, per-monitor scale and position, or motion on one screen and a still on the other, macOS has no built-in path, and that setup deserves its own walkthrough.

Read the full guide: how to set a different wallpaper on each monitor on Mac.

How to Use a Video as Your Mac Wallpaper

macOS cannot do this natively. There is no setting, hidden or otherwise, that accepts an MP4 as a desktop wallpaper: the Wallpaper pane takes photos, dynamic desktops and aerials, and stops there.

That is the gap Wallper exists to fill. It plays real 4K video behind your icons, pauses itself when a full-screen app is open or when your MacBook is on battery, and in our measured test it cost about one percent of a single core. Pick something from the 50 free 4K live wallpapers and it is a two-click setup.

Read the full guide: how to set a video as a live wallpaper on Mac. And if you want video only while the Mac is idle, that is a different feature with its own setup: how to set a video as a screensaver.

How to Change the Lock Screen Wallpaper on Mac

For a static lock screen, there is nothing separate to configure: macOS shows your desktop wallpaper on the Lock Screen automatically, so changing the desktop changes both.

A live lock screen, with video still playing while the Mac is locked, is where things get hard. Apple keeps this surface locked down about as tightly as anything in macOS. The manual route means converting your video to the exact format the system expects, swapping files inside protected system folders, authenticating past the warnings, and then redoing all of it when an update quietly puts everything back. People do manage it, but it takes an evening, breaks easily, and one wrong step leaves you with a broken lock screen instead of a beautiful one.

Wallper was the first app to make this possible without any of that, and it is still the only one that does it fully natively. On macOS 26 Tahoe it hands playback to Apple's own Lock Screen pipeline, the same mechanism the system uses for its built-in wallpapers, so nothing gets modified, hacked or weakened. Because macOS itself runs the playback, there is no extra app burning resources or battery while your Mac sits locked. You pick a wallpaper, and the desktop and Lock Screen become one continuous scene.

Read the full guide: how to set a live wallpaper on your Mac lock screen.

Mac Wallpaper Not Changing: Quick Fixes

When a wallpaper refuses to change, or resets on its own, it is almost always one of these five:

Important: wallpapers are stored per Space and per display. Most "it reset itself" reports are a different Space still holding the old image.

You changed a different Space. Wallpapers are per Space, per display. Switch to the Space that looks wrong and set it there too.

The source file moved. If you set a photo from a folder and later moved or deleted that file, macOS quietly falls back after a restart. Re-add the image from its new location, or use Add Photo so it is copied into the wallpaper library.

The image format is unusual. JPEG, PNG, HEIC and TIFF are safe. If the file came from somewhere exotic, open it in Preview, export as PNG, and set that.

The desktop is stuck. The Dock process draws the desktop, and restarting it is harmless: open Terminal, run killall Dock, and the Dock plus wallpaper redraw in a second.

A wallpaper app is fighting the system. If a third-party wallpaper tool is running, it owns the desktop for as long as it runs. Change the wallpaper inside the app instead, or quit it first. Wallper users can pause or switch wallpapers per display straight from the menu bar, and the troubleshooting guide covers the rest.

From a Photo to a Desktop That Moves

That is every level of Mac wallpaper: a photo, a rotating folder, Apple's dynamic scenes, and full 4K video on the desktop and Lock Screen.

The first three are built in. The fourth is two clicks away: Wallper is free to download, the gallery is free to browse, and the 7-day trial covers everything, including the Lock Screen.