Top Backgrounds For Mac

‎A breathtaking photo for your desktop wallpaper, every day. Unsplash is the world’s premier platform for HD photography. Millions of submitted photos have been narrowed down to the absolute best by the Unsplash community. Today, you get to enjoy the fruits of our labor. From space pics taken by NA. We've rounded up the best Zoom backgrounds that'll refresh your space for free. No matter if you opt for the funny or traditional route, download these virtual backgrounds for your next video call. MacOS Mojave supports Dynamic Wallpapers. With macOS Mojave, Apple has introduced two new time-shifting desktops that match the hour of the day wherever you are. Now you can create them yourself or browse the gallery to find a wallpaper that fits your personal style.

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How often do you change your desktop's wallpaper? Instead of the loud and busy artworks, have you considered using something elegant that pleases your eyes? Well, you'll only end up wasting time on hundreds of sites that offer wallpapers. We did write about Wallpaper and Screensaver apps for Macs but that was back in 2015. Things have changed a lot since then.

Firstly, the latest wallpaper apps offer a more vibrant and curated collection to work appropriately with the Macs and MacBooks. Secondly, they eliminate the entire charade of cropping and adjusting resolutions. Finally, they offer a spectacular selection of photos and ease of switching between your favorite wallpapers without meddling with the screen settings every time.

Let's check out six best wallpaper apps for your Mac.

Note: All the apps on this list are compatible with macOS 10.15.6 Catalina. That said, we don't guarantee that all of them will work on older macOS versions.

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1. Wallpaper Wizard

Looking to jazz up your Mac's desktop and extended workspace? Your search ends at the Wallpaper Wizard 2 app that provides over 25,000 wallpapers and the collection updates every month. The fact that it has categorized and clustered the wallpapers as per interests makes your search quite easy. Whether you are an art or food connoisseur, the app provides images that you can spend a day just checking them out.

All the images are in HD and 4K quality, making a world of difference on the Retina Macs and 4K monitors. You can even create a wallpaper playlist called Roll to let the app cycle between them. For multi-monitor setup users, the app also enables you to Roll them through the desktop spaces. You can then cycle between them at regular intervals ranging from 5 minutes to 1 week. With a massive, curated, classified and jaw-dropping collection of HD wallpapers like that, I doubt you'll ever have to look anywhere else.

Wallpaper Wizard costs $9.99 from MacPaw Store as a one-time purchase. You can pay the same amount as a monthly subscription to Setapp, an alternative store to Mac App Store. That will get you free access to several popular (over 150) paid apps for that nominal price.

Get Wallpaper Wizard

2. Unsplash Wallpapers

The official Unsplash Wallpapers app is the ultimate resource of copyright-free images and wallpapers to deck up your Mac desktop. The fantastic shots of landscapes and nature photos always feel like a breath of fresh air. The app offers a minimalist and simple interface to change the wallpapers on a Daily, Weekly, or Manually.

I love the option 'Update on all screens and desktops' since it is quite useful to folks like me who connect the MacBook Air to an external desktop. That means you can use the same wallpaper in a different resolution automatically. Yeah, no need to have a separate wallpaper for the extended desktop space.

Unsplash Wallpapers app is free to use and offers a gateway to the crazy collection of the images uploaded regularly.

Get Unsplash Wallpapers

3. Irvue

Irvue is quite similar to the Unsplash app with the useful menu bar app. With that, you can let the app refresh photos randomly or from specific collections at predefined intervals ranging from 30 mins to a month. Of course, you can update manually too, but should you?

You can always download the wallpapers that you like. Alternatively, you can add new channels apart from the usual Featured one to let the program pick the wallpapers accordingly. Just like Unsplash, Irvue is free to download and use.

Get Irvue

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4. DailyWall

If your choices are limited only to a handful of categories, DailyWall is the perfect contender app. You can pick wallpapers from categories like Landscapes, Aerial, Dark, Cars, Animals, Nature, Architecture, Food, and Devices. Of course, you can uncheck the ones you don't like.

The only thing that might bother you is the Skip limit. Yeah, you can only skip one photo per day. You can pay $4.99 per month to enjoy features like syncing the same wallpaper across your devices, spaces, favorites, iCloud sync, etc. DailyWall claims of continually updating its collection based on the wallpapers picked by professional photographers from sources like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay.

Get DailyWall

5. Wallcat

Don't let the word cat in the name fool you. The Wallcat app offers a curated compilation of photos that refresh every day. The beautiful part of this app is that it measures only 7.5MB.

You can choose between five different 'channels' to pick the one that suits your mood. The Light and Dark gradient channels are available only for Macs running macOS 10.15 Catalina and higher.

Wallcat is one of those honest apps that provides full credit to the original creator of the photo artwork. The menu bar icon lets you access that creator's profile from the drop-down. Wallcat is available for $1.99 from the Mac App Store.

Get Wallcat

6. NASA Picture of the Day

As the name suggests, the app's purpose is straightforward - provide you with a new photo every day in high resolution. The coolest part about this app is that every picture comes with an explanation about it written by a professional astronomer. You can download those gorgeous images of the space or continue to enjoy a new one daily.

The only possible setback here is that sometimes the photos are in a different aspect ratio and may not fit your desktop background. For instance, I struggled to adjust a few images with the 1400x900 aspect ratio of my MacBook Pro. The same images looked beautiful on the extended 4K or ultrawide monitor with USB C for Macs. The app comes with a 10-day free trial, and after that, you can pay $10 annually to continue using it to nurture your enthusiasm about space.

Get NASA Picture of the Day App

At the cost of sounding callous, I've often downloaded and use the wallpapers suggested through our compilations in the past. However, many didn't suit the MacBook Air's native resolution. Also, I wanted something elegant and professional looking.

You can check out our goldmine of curated wallpaper posts by clicking the Tag link below.

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#wallpapers

Click here to see our wallpapers articles page

A Fresh Start Everyday

These Wallpaper apps for Mac can transform your desktop with just a few clicks and add to the visual delight. The comfort of changing a wallpaper automatically every day or picking one quickly without opening a browser is priceless.

Next up:Struggling with the speed and basic tasks on your Mac? Click on the next link to check the useful macOS apps to optimize your Mac.

The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.Read NextTop 7 Useful macOS Apps to Optimize Your MacAlso See#customization #MacBooks

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Let’s face it. The default wallpapers on the Mac gets boring after a few weeks. And setting new wallpaper manually is tiresome.

What’s more, granted there is no shortage of “HD wallpapers” websites anywhere on the internet, at the same time the ever-growing demand for more has also given rise to a bevy of unusable, flat-out lousy offers.

So where to turn to for quality material?

Well you’ll be happy to know that there are awesome apps that deliver hand curated, spectacular art right to your desktop background every day or so.

Since I am a wallpaper junkie, I’m here with the best Mac wallpaper applications review for you guys out there who need to give your desktop a fresh coat of paint.

To do the topic full justice and cover all the bases, we have decided to break the winner down into separate brackets: standard HD wallpapers, Live Photo wallpapers and 3D wallpapers for animated backdrops. With that, please navigate our list according to your preference and enjoy your new wallpaper choice.

Best HD wallpaper app for Mac: Wallpaper Wizard 2

This Wallpaper Wizard is acquired by MacPaw and has been updated to version 2. It’s developed to give your Mac’s display changing, fresh looks from a curated collection of hand-picked HD, Retina-compatible photos.

I toppled across this great tool a little while ago and was flabbergasted seeing how efficiently this works.

Let’s see why this app has been stuck in my mind…

Design

My first thoughts of Wallpaper Wizard 2 was that it was not going to have an elegant interface… boy they proved me wrong. Just the website alone grasped my attention. All of the screenshots, features, and the collection of wallpapers being shown was completely amazing!

When you download and install the application, you’ll see a beautiful and elegant main interface. It is not cluttered with extra icons, here you’ll be approached with a simple “App Store” style catalog of numerous thumbnails of background collections.

Features

We are often used to great applications with great features: but personalizing the computer can also be an important task and we do not always have the time to dive among endless web pages to find what we are looking for. Wallpaper Wizard 2 offers different options to get it easily.

Explore tab – This is the biggest selling point of Wallpaper Wizard… the gallery. This might surprise you, the developer handpicked more than 25,000 of 4K HD retina-compatible wallpapers that divided by themes and moods into collections. And naturally, every wallpaper in the app is of excellent quality and visual appeal.
When the developer team sent us the review request, they mentioned their source of those great gallery collection.
We have several sources: websites with CC0 images (unsplash, pixabay), personal connections with authors and also we’ve partnered with depositphotos.com so part of the content is licensed from them.
Wallpaper Wizard gives several possibilities to find a collection matching your mood. You can either scroll through the Explore tab and check what’s in a catchy collection or use search by tags or keywords.
Roll tab – Once you have selected a bunch of wallpaper categoriesand added to the Roll, you can set the app to start rotating them every 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, every day or every time you wake your Mac from sleep. If you have multiple displays, it can be set to either display the same wallpaper on both displays or pick a different one for each. If you don’t like a wallpaper that is currently displayed, the menu bar icon gives you the option to remove it from your queue.
Favorites tab – I’m so glad to see the Favorites into play in Wallpaper Wizard. The tab is a home for your most precious wallpapers. Every time you click on the star button , a collection or picture it belongs to moves to Favorites, where you can easily find the Wallpaper you like.

Pricing

The Wizard Wallpaper app is available at the official website for $9.99 and is compatible with all Macs running Mac OS X 10.11 or later. It’s also available via Setapp, a $9.99 monthly subscription service.

A word of sum up

I’m really loving Wallpaper Wizard. It comes with simple yet elegant interface, and with some interesting options: multi-monitor support, creation of own collections and grouping of content by themes.

If you’re looking for some variety in your day, pick up a copy of Wallpaper Wizard 2. You can also check everything out before making a purchase, this software product gives you 7 days of free trial.

Best live wallpaper app for Mac: Live Desktop

If you’re bored of that still image for your desktop wallpaper, Live Desktop is a Mac app that gives you a selection of animated themes to choose from.

Interface

Like in the case of many applications of this sort, after Live Desktop has finished installing on your Mac, it can be easily accessed from OS X’s status bar by clicking its item.

Themes

With twenty-four official themes and an ever-expanding assortment of custom themes, Live Wallpaper offers an array of high-res images and animations to liven up your Mac screen.

Live Desktop is a customizable wallpaper app with loads of official themes that keep increasing as the user community adds more. Users can then import custom themes, which can be downloaded here. Each theme has a unique layout, clock, text, and weather forecast.

The app also includes highlight features such as edit mode and multiple monitor support. You can change the position of the time, clock, or text to any position. And if you use multiple monitors, you can choose to display different themes for each display.

Price

Live Desktop is available in Mac App Store for free, but comes $14.99 in-app purchase. It looks as though the developer will continue to pump resources into the app, meaning that the $14.99 outlay should get you a Mac app that will periodically get new themes and experiences added to it.

A word of note

Sure, live wallpapers can provide some pleasing eye-candy, but do them eat up battery? Yes, they do. But given that most of the apps are so optimized and battery friendly, a live wallpaper wouldn’t be a burden on your battery, CPU and performance of your Mac.

Best 3D wallpaper app for Mac: Earth 3D

Earth 3D is a cool app we recently discovered in the Mac App Store. It is a combination of 3D Screensaver and Live Wallpaper, you can launch app in a full screen and use as 3D screen saver or launch in a small window and enable Live Wallpaper mode and app periodically will generate a new wallpaper.

Earth 3D gives you live wallpapers and screensavers of the earth, with details of buildings, airplanes, and more. It shows you over 2,600 geographic objects, over 500 wonders of the world, a real=life night sky, a day/night cycle with city lights, and a whole lot more. The graphics are high-quality 3D, with HD textures for 1080p and up, and it supports Apple’s Retina displays. There’s also an interactive mode where you can click and drag to explore the planet.

Pricing

You can buy Earth 3D on the Mac App Store for US$2.99.

Other wallpaper app options

There were a lot of other great wallpaper apps that we considered when writing this review, but none of them quite measured up to our top picks. Still, they definitely have unique features that deserve a mention.

Irvue For Mac

Previously called Unsplash Wallpaper, it’s nice to see this Irvue app pulls desktop wallpaper photos from the Unsplash.com — a website with a ton of beautiful & free stock photos collection — and sets them as wallpapers for your Mac.

Irvue is a simple FREE app that lives in your menu bar at the top which allows you to adjust the settings which you can set to change at intervals of your choosing. It even allows you to download the images.

Wallcat

Wallcat is another lovely menubar app for Mac that automatically delivers a new wallpaper for your desktop.It offers curated streams of wallpapers that may or may not be from Unsplash.

You can’t change the update frequency, and new wallpapers are limited to once per day.

If you want a basic, hassle-free way to get wallpapers on your Mac, this is the app for you.

Satellite Eyes

This live wallpaper is dead simple: Install Satellite Eyes, and your Mac’s GPS locates you and shows you a bird’s-eye view of your location from wherever you are.

It’s quite cool. Better yet, you get to tell your therapist that, yes, you really are being spied upon by an eye in the sky.

Living Wallpaper HD

Cool Desktop Backgrounds Mac

Living Wallpaper HD is a lightweight OS X application that offers a selection of beautiful, themed scenes that will add life to your desktop. From cityscapes and sunsets to far away galaxies – each with a cleverly integrated clock and weather widget – your screen will always have that special touch.

Moving Backgrounds For Mac

If you want to have weather and time related information right in front of you all the time, then Live Wallpaper HD is worthy of your attention.

Final words

If you always have multiple apps open on your Mac, perhaps not, as you probably don’t pay much attention to the background image. However, if you like seeing gorgeous wallpapers on your Mac’s screen, these three picks make it easy and fun to do just that.