4 Ways To Make Your iPhone Wallpaper Change Automatically

Instead of looking at the same wallpaper on your iPhone every day, you can use Shortcuts or Focus modes to have them change automatically. You can look at specific wallpapers at specific times of the day, or have a random wallpaper or photo show each day.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you several different ways that you can have your iPhone's wallpaper change automatically at certain times of the day.
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You can easily change the wallpaper used on your iPhone on both the Lock Screen and on your Home Screen. There are several different kinds of wallpapers to choose from including using your own photos. But you can also use the Shortcuts App and other techniques to have your wallpaper change automatically so it is not always the same thing and you don't have to remember to manually change it before you get tired of it. 
First let's take a look at how you set Wallpapers up. If you go into the Settings App on your iPhone and then you go down to Wallpaper you have your different wallpapers here. I've only got the default wallpaper here. If I scroll over I can see there is nothing there. It asks me to setup a new one. So let's leave the default there and setup a new one. You can choose from a variety of different kinds of wallpaper. For instance, you can use your own photos here. You can use one of these featured wallpapers. Photo Shuffle. Weather, astronomy and other things. 
So, for instance, let's pick one of these weather ones. I'll add that as a new one. I'll just tap Add here at the top. I'll say Set It as a Pair. Now I've got this second one here. So I have two to choose from. Let's continue adding more. I'll add one here and I'm going to use the one with the moon in it. I'll add that one. I'll also set that up as a pair. Let's add one more here. This time I'm going to use Photos and I'm going to choose a specific photo. Let's choose, for instance, this one right here. Then I'm going to set that up by adding it. I'm going to add it as a pair. I can also customize the Home Screen which is important to do with  Photos because you have a decision to make here as to whether to blur this photo or not. I'll have it not blur in this case so I'll turn it Off here. Then I'll tap done. So you can play around with adding new wallpapers. 
Then once you have all these setup you can move between them pretty easily. On your Home Screen just go all the way to the top and drag down. This takes you to the Lock Screen without actually locking your iPhone. Then tap and hold on the Wallpaper. You can go back and forth between these. You can even add a new one there as you saw. So I can use this weather one, for instance, right here. 
So now let's look at ways to have the wallpaper change automatically. We're going to start with using the Shortcut's App. I'll go into Shortcuts here and we're going to add a new shortcut with the Plus button at the top. Then we're going to add an action. The action is going to pick one of the wallpapers at random. So we're going to search here for wallpaper to find the actions that have to do with wallpapers. We see here one of them is Get All Wallpapers. So we'll select that. This will give us a list of all the wallpapers. If we actually run this with the little Play button there at the bottom you can see it gives us a list here and I can flip through the different wallpapers. So I can tap here and you can see a list of all of them. So, so far so good. 
Now let's add another action and we're going to search for List. Since we've got a list here what we want to do is we want to pick from a list. So we've got Get Item From List here. We'll select that and it's get first item from the list of wallpapers. Tap first item here and instead, say, we want a random one. So it is going to get a random one from that list. Now we're going to add a third action here. We'll again search for Wallpapers and we see that one of them is Switch Between Wallpapers. So now we'll switch to the item from that list. So, get all the wallpapers. Pick a random one and then Switch to it. Let's rename this to Random Wallpaper. Done. Now I'm going to tap the i button here and just as an easy way to activate this I'm going to Add it to the Home Screen. I could take the time to make an icon or pick a new name but I'll just add it as is. Now you can see I've got it there. If I tap it, it's going to pick one of those four wallpapers at random. So I can continue to tap it and it will switch between them. So I"ll show you how to have that automatically happen at every day at a certain time in a minute. 
Before I do that let's look at another option. How to set one of your photos as a wallpaper. So, remember when we were in the Settings App and we looked at all the different wallpapers. One of them that we chose was to use our own photo as a wallpaper. This was the fourth one. Wallpaper #4 used the photo. It is important to remember that. So we're going to change wallpaper 4 to Show A Random Photo. Now also in the Photos App note that I've got a bunch of albums setup. As a matter of fact I've setup an album called Wallpapers and I've placed some of my favorite photos in there to use as wallpapers. But you can use an existing album or you could use your Favorites here in the Photos that you have favored. So let's go into Shortcuts again here and I'm going to create a new one here. I'm going to add the Action to select a photo. So we'll do Find Photo and there is Find Photos right there. Find All Photos. Well, we'll select and add a filter here and say the album is, and I can select from the list of albums. I can select Wallpapers. Note if I wanted to select My Favorites instead of Album Is, I would simply tap Album here and say, is Favorite instead. But I'll stick with using the Wallpapers Album. This makes it easy to add new photos or remove some from the album without having to update the Shortcut in the future. It is just going to look in whatever are the current photos in that album. 
Here I'm going to sort them and I'm going to select Random. So it is going to  randomly shuffle the list of photos that it gets. Then I'm going to limit to just one. So in other words sort them randomly and pick the first one. Which is the same as saying pick a random photo from the album. Then I'm going to look for Wallpaper again. What I want to do is I want to switch between wallpapers. I want to switch to the fourth wallpaper here. The one that is Photos. Now that I've switched to it I want to set the photo to something else. So I'll search for wallpaper again. I can see Set Wallpaper Photo is another option. So I will now choose set and I'll choose the 4th wallpaper here to and then I'm going to choose the output from the photos Action right here and then for Lock Screen and Home Screen. So I could change that and just have it be for one or the other or both. Then  I'm going to tap this little button here to Review More Options. I don't want it to show a Preview. I don't want it to Crop to Subject. I don't want to Blur it. 
So now I've got something that is going to find a random photo from the Wallpapers Album that I created. Switch to wallpaper 4 and then change wallpaper 4 to show that random photo. Let's go and rename this to Random Photo and then I'm going to tap the Info button here at the bottom. Add to Home Screen and then add this here and now I've got this one. So notice I'm on the Weather wallpaper here. I'm not even on the Photos Wallpaper. But if I tap this it will switch to the Photos Wallpaper and then select one of those photos at random. If I use it again it is going to select another random photo from that album and switch to that. 
 So now I've got two different ways of changing my wallpaper depending upon what I want. Now how can I set it so it runs automatically. So we're going to go back into the Shortcuts App. I'm going to tap at the bottom where it says Automation. I'm going to add an Automation. I'll use the Plus Button here and I'm going to say Time of Day. So let's say I want this to happen everyday at, I'll just do it early in the morning before I wakeup. So 6:00.  I'll have it do it Daily. I'll have it run immediately without confirmation and no Notification when run. Then I'll tap Next here and then what do I want it to do. Well, I need to pick a shortcut for it to run. So I can pick one of those two things I did. For instance, I can pick Random Photo or Random Wallpaper. If I pick Random Photo then everyday at 6:00 a.m. it is going to run the Random Photo shortcut and it will change to wallpaper 4 and show a random photo from the Wallpaper's Album. I could have also selected the other shortcut we created to have it select one of the wallpaper's I have at random. 
Now there is another way to set the wallpaper at a specific time. Let's go into the Settings App here. We're going to go into Focus Modes. So here you've got various focus modes. Now if you're already using Focus Modes to have different modes say during the day or in the evening or at night then this will be easy. But if you're not using it you've got to set some of these up. I'm going to set one up here that is going to be a Custom one and I'm going to call it Evening. I'm going to just stick with that suggested icon there. Then I'm going to customize the focus. Now one of the things I can do with Customize the Focus is that I can choose the wallpaper right here. So I can set this one to, say, be the Astronomy Wallpaper there. Done. Evening focus will now actually use that. Now if I go further down I can set a schedule. So I can Add Schedule here and I can set it to a specific time. I can say, well I want this to happen at say 6 p.m. Then I want it to turn off at 5 a.m. and Done. Now this Focus will be used and thus the wallpaper will also be used starting at 6 p.m. every night. I can also customize other things having to do with this focus like which apps are allowed to send me Notifications and such if I like. So you could setup a variety of different focus modes. Say Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Weekend, whatever you want and then have those have customized settings including which wallpaper to show and set the times for those focus modes to be used. Then your wallpaper will change along with the focus mode.
Now one last thing I want to show you is how to set a specific wallpaper to be used at a specific time of day. So you could do that really very easily with shortcuts like we've had before that are actually much simpler. So I could just add a new shortcut here, add an action, and then set the wallpaper to be whichever one I want. I can select which one I want right here. So I can set it to say this one and just have the shortcut be this one action. Then give it a name like, Weather Wallpaper. Like that. So all this shortcut will do is switch to the weather wallpaper. So once you've done that now you can go into Automations here and you can add automation for a specific time of day. I can have it be every day at sunrise, for instance or I can set a specific time of day here for that to happen. Let's say 10 a.m. and then select Weather Wallpaper and you can see it right there I can always go back in and Edit it. You may want to actually set it so that it runs immediately. Not after a confirmation and sends no notification or anything like that. So now everyday at 10 a.m. the weather wallpaper will be shown. I can set a different one for 11. I can set a different one for 3 in the afternoon and I can just have a bunch of different wallpapers each for a specific time of day and setup shortcuts and then automations to launch those shortcuts at the time I specify.
So you can combine all these different techniques to do different things. For instance you can create a shortcut that selects a random wallpaper from an album and have that set to run at a specific time of day. So you can have, say, beach photos show up at 9 a.m. You can have another shortcut that, say, is choosing from a different album of city skyline photos and have that set to run at 1 p.m. So you can mix and match these techniques for different results. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “4 Ways To Make Your iPhone Wallpaper Change Automatically”

Sheldon

11 months ago

Thanks bunches

wbump25

Great way to personalize your iPhone. I think I've set it up to show weather on the Home Screen at 7am We'll find out tomorrow!

Jeff Pankin

Thanks, Gary. Excellent explanation and fun! Could you do something like this shortcut on the Mac, especially with the moving wallpaper?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jeff: You can set the wallpaper on a Mac in a Shortcut, but there is no timed automations on a Mac like there is on an iPhone. You'd need a third-party app for that. But then you do have some better options for rotating the wallpaper in System Settings on a Mac. So maybe you don't need a Shortcut at all.

Jason

Gary, thanks for this! I have learned so much from you with these videos and tutorials! Keep up the great work.

Jonathan

Thank you for this video! Not only does it make it more fun to use my iPhone it also helps me appreciate Shortcuts more. One issue which may be out of scope, how do I crop/edit the photos in my Wallpaper album in my Photos app to fit more nicely as an iPhone wallpaper. For example, I have these great photos of Monument Valley but they are either too large or off center for my iPhone. Is there a trick to this or is it more hit and miss and is it easier to do this on my Mac or on my iPhone?

Jonathan: I don't know of any trick to it other than to crop to roughly the ratio of your phone's screen.

Mike Koscielski

Your response to Gary Rosenzweig's comment is not exactly correct. Yes, one can rotate wallpaper on Mac with Ventura. However, that option does NOT exist on Mac with Sonoma. Otherwise, great tip--thanks!

4 Ways To Make Your iPhone Wallpaper Change Automatically

Comments: 8 Responses to “4 Ways To Make Your iPhone Wallpaper Change Automatically”

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