Understanding the Different Types of Mac Desktop Backgrounds

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Lets take a look at all the different types of Desktop backgrounds.

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Now when you're looking at your Mac the image that you see behind everything is called the Desktop Background. Some people like to call it the Desktop Wallpaper or just Wallpaper. It's essentially just a high resolution image that can be almost anything. But there are different types of Desktop Backgrounds. If we go to System Preferences and then select Desktop & Screen Saver, then click Desktop, you'll see the current Desktop background right here. You'll see other choices you can make in a list here on the left and here on the right when you select one of these. 

The first type of Desktop Background is the Dynamic Desktop. This is an image, like the current one I'm using, that will change throughout the day. It's actually a collection of images in a single file. So in macOS Monterey you've got the Monterey graphic as the default. But you have these other ones as well including ones that were used in Big Sur and Catalina. Notice the little Cloud icon here. Apple isn't going to include these large images when it installs macOS. But you can just download them for free by clicking on the Cloud icon. So if I wanted this one I could click and it would download. Some of these are illustrations like this one for instance. I'll download it and use this one. You can see the progress right here and you could see here this illustration that's used. It looks really nice on any size display.  

When you choose a Dynamic Background you can select here and choose to have it work as Dynamic so it will change throughout the day or just go to one of the frames, like the Light Frame or the Dark Frame. See it here with Light or Dark. 

So how can you see which images are in here? Well, you could go and figure out where in the system these files are. But you could also Drag and Drop from this to a place in the Finder like the Desktop. Then if you Control Click on it and choose Open With Preview, which should be the default app, it will open it up in Preview and you could actually see all of the different images stored in this one file. So here's this one here and you could see this version and this version which are the Light and Dark versions. Then you could see the Dynamic one which will change throughout the day. So early in the morning it's going to look like dawn. Then it's going to be daytime and then it's going to get towards dusk and then nighttime. There's no set number of images. So some may have more than others. 

So notice Dynamic Images will appear here if you have on the left Apple Desktop Pictures chosen. There's more under here. We have light and dark Desktops here. If you choose one of these then you'll get three choices here. Automatic, Light, and Dark. So there's really only two images in this. If I were to Drag and Drop this here, open it up in Preview, you'll see just the two images, Light and Dark. So when using a Light and Dark Desktop you have it set to Automatic. Then it will follow your Dark Mode settings. To see those go into General and then you have Appearance. You have Light, Dark which will make it always light and dark and use that Desktop Background version. Or Auto which will adjust depending upon whether it's light or dark outside. Of course, many people like to switch between these two depending upon what they're doing. A quicker way to get to this is by going to Control Center and then to Display right here. You can switch Dark Mode on or off right there. 

An even quicker way is go into Control Center and drag the display control up into the Menu Bar. Put it there. Now instead of using Control Center just click that and the button is right there. Now underneath that you've got Desktop Pictures. So these are Static Images. Notice there's no option here to choose Light, Dark, or Dynamic or anything like that. There's just this one image. That's all it is. Apple gives you a whole bunch of them that you could choose from. These change with every version of macOS. So you have some older ones here. This one is called Big Sur Mountains. It's from Big Sur. Some of these will be Desktop Backgrounds from older versions. Like here is Catalina Coast. 

Now another thing you can choose is here under Apple is Colors. You choose this you're going to see some solid colors here. So you can just choose an all Black background. You can choose a specific color. You can also, in addition to these, you could click here and bring up the Color Picker and choose any color that you want. So you can use any parts of the Color Picker here to decide what color you want for your background. 

Using a solid color is probably the ultimate for some who are into productivity as it gives you no distractions at all. 

You can also choose your own image. One way to do that is under Photos here you can choose a photo. If this isn't open you could open it up like that and then you could look in Albums like this. You can look under Shared Albums. You could look under People. You could look in your Favorites album. If you just click here it will show you all photos. So you can go in here and choose a photo and it will use one of your photos. Now when you choose a photo like this chances are it's not perfectly sized for the screen. That's okay because you can choose exactly how it's shown. You can have it Fill The Screen. You can have it Fit To Screen. So in this case the screen is wider than the photo you have bars on either side and then you can choose the color that you want to use to fill in that side. There we go. You can choose Stretch to Fill Screen so it will stretch the image. You can also choose Center or Tile if the images are actually smaller than the screen which this one is not.

Now you don't just have to choose something that's in your Photos Album. Another thing you could do is under Folder here, by default you're going to see your Pictures Folder. If you select that it's going to show you any images in your Pictures Folder. So let's open a new Finder window here. If I go to my User Folder there's Pictures and in that you'll usually see your Photos Library and then anything else you want to add. So if I were to take a photo, let's just drag and drop a photo into here, and now I go back here then you could see it appear when I choose Pictures. Then you could select that. Now I can also add some more to this. I'm going to put two more here in the Pictures Folder and you could see when I have Pictures selected I could select anyone of these images that's in there. But I could also create my own folders. I could create a subfolder in here. So let's create a new folder and just call it Wallpapers. Just to make things neater I'm going to move all of these into it. Now when I look here I don't see anything because there's nothing in the Pictures folder. It's not going to show me images in subfolders. I'm going to click the plus button here and then I'm going to navigate to the Pictures folder. Select Wallpapers. Choose it. Now I've got that as a folder here. This didn't need to be inside of the Pictures folder at all. It could have been in my Documents folder. It could have been on an external drive. It could have been anywhere. 

In addition to that you could also go anywhere you want in the Finder and you could select an image that you want to use and Drag and Drop it to this. When you do it becomes your Desktop Background. It doesn't need to appear on the left at all. So there are three main ways to choose your own photos as Desktop Background. Drag and Drop into here. Choose from your Photos or Choose from a Folder that you've added here. 

Now when you use Photos or Folders here you do have an important additional option. You can select Change Picture. If you set that up, let's set it up for every five seconds so you can see the change, it's going to take whatever folder you have selected and it's going to run through them. You can have it just go through in order or select Random Order here. You can also do the same thing for Photos. For instance I could choose Favorites and now you could see here it's going to go through these and change every five seconds to one of these. Plus when you choose an album in Photos, like Favorites for instance, it will automatically update with whatever you add to it. So as you add new things to Favorites or to whatever album that you've setup for this then you'll get those included in your Desktop Backgrounds as well without ever having to go into System Preferences and change anything. You don't have to set this up as a time. You could set it up when logging in. So every time you log in you get a different Desktop Background from the album or from the folder that you choose or when waking from Sleep. Or another good option is to set it to everyday. 

Now those are the basic options that are built into macOS. But you can also find more if you go into the Mac App Store. There if you search for Desktop Backgrounds you're going to find tons of different apps that do different things. Some of them just add backgrounds. Sometimes dynamic and sometimes light and dark to System Preferences so you can find them in there. Other times you have to go into the App to choose the Desktop Background. Some of these do all sorts of things like have animated backgrounds and such. Of course if power consumption is a concern and you're also concerned about productivity you may want to avoid backgrounds that are changing all the time.   

So what you choose as your Desktop Background is up to you. But don't feel like the decision is that permanent. You see how easy it is to change the Desktop Background. So you can change it according to your mood or whether it's the weekend or weekday or just what you're doing at the moment. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.