Using Your Own Photos Or Graphics As Desktop Backgrounds

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use your own photos or graphics as your Desktop background.

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So you don't have to settle for using just the desktop backgrounds that Apple gives you. You can use any photo that you've got, a graphic from the internet, or create your own graphics as desktop backgrounds.

The simplest way to use your own image as your desktop image is to have a file in the Finder. It could be sitting on your desktop but probably should be somewhere in your documents folder. Now you can get to the System Preferences for your desktop one of two ways. One is you can Control click on the desktop and there's Change Desktop Background. That will take you to the same place as if you go to the Apple Menu, System Preferences, and then select Desktop & Screensaver, and then clicked on Desktop at the top. This is where you control what your desktop background looks like. 

Now you have this drop area here. All you need to do if you want to use your own image as the desktop background is to select it so it's outlined there. Then you drag and drop your own image into it. You'll see the cursor change to have that green plus icon. Drop it in and it will instantly change the desktop background to match that image. Now you can also do this drag and drop using the Photos app. So in the Photos app you can take any image that you want, drag that from the photos into the same System Preferences drop zone and it will change the background. So you can drag and drop from a file or from the Photos Library.

Now you'll notice here on the left several different choices that will then allow you to choose Desktop background. You can use Apple's Desktop Pictures, you can choose a set of colors, you can go into Photos and you can access your Photos Library here. You also have this Folder section. In it you can see your Pictures folder by default. Select that and it will show you any images that you have in your Pictures folder. Now let's go to that folder in the Finder.

So in the Finder here I'm going to do a new Finder window and then I'm going to do Go Home. In my Home folder I have my Pictures folder and there I'll see things like my Photo Library file. But I can also drag and drop my own photos in here. So when I do that I'll actually see them appear here. Let's click away from it and then back onto it again and you'll see that there. So this is a good place to put any images I may want to use as desktop backgrounds.

Now what might even be better is if I create a new folder inside of here and call this Desktop Backgrounds. I can put this image in here. Now I'll click away and back. You'll see that it's not there anymore. I have to use the Plus button. With the Plus button I can add this folder. I'm going to drag and drop it to make it easier to navigate to. You can see I've got Desktop Backgrounds there selected. I'll do Choose. So now I have Pictures which is the main level here of the Pictures folder and Desktop Backgrounds which is this folder I've created.

So the great thing is that now I can add things to this folder and I have easy access to them. So I can go into the Photos app like before and say I want to choose another photo here to use. Drag that into Desktop Backgrounds. Let me Drag in a couple more. Then I'll Quit the Photos app. Now in this folder here I've got a bunch of different ones. When I go into System Preferences, let me select something else and then go back, and you can see that I have all of these images here. Now I can select anyone easily and use that as my Desktop background.

Now note I have options here when using one of these images. I can say Fill Screen, Fit to Screen which is going to create bars on the side here because it's a 4x3 image and a 16x9 screen. You can have it Stretch which probably isn't what you want because it will stretch the image but we'll see how that can be useful here in a minute. You can also have it Center. So if the image was smaller than the screen it would actually be centered and you'd see the background color all around there. So in most cases you'd want to use Fill to Screen for photos.

So what if you don't actually want to use a photo but want to use some sort of colored pattern or something. You can create those in any image editing app that you want or you can use something like Keynote. So let's go into Keynote here and I'll create a new presentation and I'll get rid of the default text there. I'll also shrink it so I can see the entire thing. Then I could add a shape. I'm going to add a basic square there and stretch it to fill. So I'm going to lock it to the edges there so it fills the entire thing. Then over here on the right I could set Color Fill to Advanced Gradient Fill. I can change it there to a radial gradient and then change those colors. So I can chance this, for instance, to be a dark blue and this one to be black. You can see I get that kind of dark blue gradient fill there. It's 16x9. I could check the document properties here and then I could see the Slide size and then go to Custom Size and I could change it to any size I want. So if I've got a much larger screen, like this one is twice that, I could change it to that. When I generate an image from this I'll get something that's the proper size and quality.

So I'll Export this to an image. I'm going to choose either TIFF or PNG for the highest quality. Then Next and then I'm going to name it. Call it Blue Radial. I'll save it here on the Dock temporarily. What will happen, I'll Hide that, as I get a folder and then in that folder one image. I'll take away this 001 there and just change it to something like that and then I will go to that Pictures folder and again to my Desktop Backgrounds, and I'll move that in there.

Now that I've done I can get rid of this folder here from the Desktop. I've got this in there. Now I could refresh this and I can see I've got this blue radial background there. Now if you've created something that's not quite the right size then you might want to use Stretch to Fill Screen. But sometimes you want to use an image but the image maybe is too bright to use for a background. Your icons get lost there. You can take an image and you can tone it down by using Keynote, or any image editing app you want. Here in Keynote I can actually grab one of these images. I'm going to drag this here into Keynote. I'm not going to drag it into the shape. I'm going to make sure I drag it so it's a separate element. I'm going to position it here. Make it a little bit larger. Then I'm going to arrange and send it back so it will be behind this colored shape here. 

Then I'm going to take the colored shape and I'm going to go Format here and I'm going to set the Opacity to something less then 100. So I can set it to say 50%. Now when I Export it I'm going to get a combination of that radial gradient and the image. So I have that here on the desktop. I will pull out that image there. Let me rename it a little bit. Stick it in there. Get rid of this empty folder now. Now I have that one here as well. So you can see I can use this which looks a little bit better than this. The icons won't get as lost.

You can also use a light color, like something close to white. Set that to 50% to fade the image back and make it brighter rather than darker. So you have a lot of options for  a desktop background. You can use your own photo. You can create a graphic, or you can modify a photo like this to create exactly the desktop background that you want.