Set Your Mac Wallpaper To Change Automatically

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can have the wallpaper on your Mac automatically change.

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Now recently I've seen a lot of people asking how they can have the wallpaper background on their Mac's Desktop change automatically. Like every day or every hour. I think the reason this question is coming up so much right now is because System Settings in Ventura looks a lot different than System Preferences in macOS Monterey and before. It's a little difficult to see exactly how to set this up.

So first there are two different ways you can have a set of photos stored so that you can use them as a set of wallpapers. The first way is as individual photo files inside of a folder in the Finder. The second way is as an album in your Photos Library. So let's start by looking at how to do it by looking at files in the Finder. I'm going to start off by going to a location where we can create a folder to store these photos. Now I think a good location for this is the Pictures Folder. So let's go to your Home Folder. In your Home Folder you should see a Pictures Folder. Go down into there you'll probably see your Photos Library there and you may see other folders that you have created or other apps have created. Let's create a new folder there and we will call it Wallpapers. You may even want to have different sets of these. So maybe this is Wallpapers 1 or Wallpapers Nature or Wallpapers 2023. However you want to do it. Here I've got some photos stored in another folder. I'm going to add them to this Wallpapers folder. So I"m going to drag them in. I'm actually going to hold the Option Key down and Copy them in so I leave them right here. Now you can see in the Wallpapers' folder here I've got these six photos. 

I could have also exported these from the Photos App and put them in there. So here like in the Photos App I can grab a photo like this one and just drag it in and add it that way. But however you do it you now have a folder that you can access and has all the photos you want to use as your set of rotating wallpapers. So let's go into System Settings and under System Settings let's go to Wallpaper. Now I've got two different screens attached to my Mac so I'm going to make sure I have the correct one selected. This is the one I want to set the wallpaper for and then you could see here it doesn't appear to be any option to have wallpapers rotate. You don't see it up here. Here are the different wallpapers that Apple supplies and you could see there's no option for it there.

But when you get down to Colors you'll see Auto-Rotate. You can actually use a solid background color and have that Auto-Rotate through. So if I look here I could see that I've got all these different colors and I can choose anyone of those to use as a background color instead of a wallpaper photo. If I choose Auto-Rotate I can have it actually rotate through all of these. Then, since I've chosen Auto-Rotate I'll actually see the options up here for that. Let's not look at the options just yet. Instead, let's add our photos because that's what we really want to do. 

To add a folder full of photos we're going to use this Add Folder button here. I'm going to click that and then I'm going to go into my Pictures Folder and then there's that Wallpapers' Folder. I'm going to choose it. Now it's going to add it as an option below. You'll see all six of those photos right here. I can actually select one and use that as my wallpaper. But, I want to Auto-Rotate them. So I'm going to select Auto-Rotate here and that will Auto-Rotate all of the photos in this folder. You'll see here my display shows the Auto-Rotate symbol with a few of those photos. Now at the top the Options change because I've selected Auto-Rotate. It will show Rotating through and then the name of the folder. Then it will show Change picture and I can select Every 5 seconds, minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, every hour or every day. I can also have it change every time I log into my Mac or every time I awake from sleep. These are useful because they will change the wallpaper frequently but never do it while you're in the middle of working. 

Then there is a button here for Randomly. If you don't have that selected it's going to go through each one of these photos in order and then loop back to the first. If I choose Randomly it's going to select one of them at random and then the next time it changes it's going to select another one at random. I'm guessing it probably uses a shuffle algorithm here. So it's probably not going to choose the same one twice in a row. 

Another thing you may want to note about adding folders here, because there's one folder that's always there, and that is the Pictures Folder itself. But, wait a minute, I don't see the Pictures Folder here. What's going on. Well, the Pictures Folder will appear here as long as there is at least one photo in the Pictures Folder. So if I drag these two into the Pictures Folder then you can see Pictures automatically appears and it's got those two images that are just sitting there at the top level of the pictures folder. I don't like this method myself because it is kind of messy to have these images just out there on the top of the Pictures Folder along with your Photos Library and any other folders you may have created. I think it is neater to have them inside of a folder you made and then specifically added here using Add Folder. But you can Auto-Rotate the photos that are seen at the top level of the Pictures Folder just like you can in any other folder you add. 

Next, let's look at using an album in the Photos App instead. So if you already have an album that you want to use like, for instance, here's an album right here and I just want to add this I could do it. Or you may want to create a new album by going to File, New Album and then maybe calling that Wallpapers or anything you want, and then adding the photos that you want to this new album you created. So I've added a bunch to it and you can see there's my Wallpapers Album. Add that here to System Settings. Instead of using the Add Folder button use this little pop-up menu right here and then select the album. If you've just created the album and you have System Settings open you may not have updated. So you can Quit System Settings and then go back in, then back to Wallpaper and now when you go to add it you should have a refreshed list and there's the Wallpapers Album. It works the same way that a folder pictures does. I can choose one of the images or I can set it to Auto-Rotate and then set how often to Auto-Rotate and whether or not it is random. 

Now the great thing about either one of these methods is it will automatically update. So see how I have six different images in my Photos Album called Wallpapers. I have six different images in the Wallpapers' Folder in the Finder. Well, let me go and add a couple of extras here to the Wallpapers' Album and then let's move, say, these two images here into my Wallpapers' Folder. So now there are eight total. Now to make sure everything is updated I'm going to Quit System Settings and go back in. Then go to Wallpaper and now I could see here that I've got eight in the Album here, including the two new ones that I just added. Also, eight here in the Folder including the two new ones I added there. 

So once you create the album or create the folder you can change what's in those and it will use the new lineup of photos that you've got in there. As a matter of fact a handy thing to do in the Photos App is to use your Favorites here and anything that you mark as a Favorite goes into the Favorites Album. If you've chosen that then that will be in the rotation for a Wallpaper. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.