Mac Wallpaper Apps We Absolutely Love

macOS has always been a visual powerhouse, offering stunning default wallpapers that highlight the system’s multimedia capabilities. However, over time, the limited variety of these built-in backgrounds might start to feel repetitive.

So, what’s the solution? You’ll be happy to know that there are fantastic apps out there that bring handpicked, jaw-dropping visuals to your desktop. With fresh, high-quality wallpapers updated daily, your Mac can always look its best.

In this guide, we’ve curated a list of the best wallpaper apps for macOS—each personally tested to ensure you get the highest quality and most beautiful options available.

TL;DR: top wallpaper apps for Mac right now:

• For live dynamic scenes: Backdrop
• For HD wallpapers: Wallpaper Wizard 2
• For dynamic desktops: 24 Hour Wallpaper
• For rad wallpapers with widgets: Hologram Desktop
• For 3D wallpapers: Earth 3D
• For free wallpapers: Unsplash Wallpaper‪s

For live dynamic scenes: Backdrop

Backdrop, developed by Cindori, revolutionizes the way you experience wallpapers on your Mac. This new app transforms your desktop into a vibrant canvas with live dynamic scenes that bring your workspace to life. Unlike traditional wallpaper apps, Backdrop offers a curated collection of high-quality, visually stunning backdrops that are optimized for macOS.

Backdrop stands out with its handcrafted themes and a global community contributing to a constantly expanding library. You can explore serene landscapes, bold abstract visuals, and minimalist designs, all within a clean and intuitive interface.

Backdrop also boasts exclusive content created in-house, providing a unique visual experience you won’t find elsewhere. New backdrops are added regularly, ensuring there’s always something fresh to discover and reflect your personal style.

Beyond static images, Backdrop features video-based backdrops and is planning to add support for dynamic interactive scenes powered by Rive, seamlessly integrating with macOS for a native and immersive experience. You can even submit your own creations to the community!

Price: Backdrop offers availability of monthly, yearly and a lifetime purchase, starts with $2.99 per month.

For HD wallpapers: Wallpaper Wizard 2

Developed with the minimalist design in mind, the Wallpaper Wizard 2 app comes from MacPaw, which is already an established development studio. We enjoyed the lightweight wallpaper app, which comes with the finesse you would expect from native macOS apps, and a gargantuan collection of visually pleasing desktop backgrounds under the hood.

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.

Bringing out the best of the Retina HD display that makes the MacBook and the iMac such an eye-candy, Wallpaper Wizard 2 gives you an ever-updating catalog of all sorts of wallpapers, ranging across the spectrum of nature, space, architecture, colors, seasons, and everything in between.

Built with the philosophy to keep things simple, we enjoyed the straightforward setup of Wallpaper Wizard 2 and barely takes up any system resources. You start off with a 7-day trial to dip your toes in, and from there, the browsing experience is rich and comprehensive. We checked out the Explore tab for some of the latest collections to pick from right way, with categories listed right below for you to look into.

The Roll section is where you add wallpapers you want to add as a carousel to the desktop. With the press of a button, you can go to the next one on the list, along with a shuffle button to mix things up. Finally, there’s an entirely separate section for the Favorites you can add from the thousands of wallpapers by hitting the star icon right next to them.

If you are looking for a specific genre of wallpapers but don’t want to sift through the thousands of high-quality offerings in the Wallpaper Wizard 2 app, there’s a handy Search bar built into it. Taking inspiration from iOS with the rounder corners and masonry grid design, you will always have a window into a fantastic collection of macOS HD wallpapers, which are updated by the thousands each month.

Price: $9.95 via official website (Free Trial for 7 Days).  It’s also available via Setapp, a $9.99 monthly subscription service that gives you access to 250+ high quality macOS apps.

For dynamic desktops: 24 Hour Wallpaper

The best wallpapers for Mac are not in short supply, we could not find a whole lot of wallpaper apps for macOS that offer you dynamic wallpapers Apple ships the operating system with. We found the ability to see the day pass by with the wallpaper reflecting it, quite pleasant, which is exactly what Jetson Creative strives to offer with the 24 Hour Wallpaper app.

Available as both, an app and a standalone bundle of wallpapers too, you will find the pricing model of 24 Hour Wallpaper as the only confusing part about it. We found everything else about the wallpaper app to be straightforward, with the wallpapers designed with the same craftsmanship that you come to expect only from the award-winning photographers that Apple hires for its official dynamic wallpapers.

Built in 5K HD resolution to keep your eyes fixated on the desktop for hours, the 24 Hour Wallpaper app features more than 80 different scenic spectacles to choose from. Apart from the three that are offered for free to give you a little taste of the goodness (Big Sur, Miami, and Earth from ISS), the app packs a whole lot more in 5120×2880 resolution.

Price: $9.99 or $1.29 per wallpaper.  It’s also available via Setapp, a $9.99 monthly subscription service.

For rad wallpapers with widgets: Hologram Desktop

Hologram Desktop is a cool app we recently discovered in the Mac App Store. The app transforms your Mac desktop with 5 million scenic wallpapers from Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels. You get five-preloaded themes that you can instantly apply and use, then would have to download more wallpapers from built-in three top image providers above.

This software is not just about wallpapers, but more about a combination of wallpapers and widgets. Why? It allows you to blend your own creativity into it by neatly arranging the shortcuts and icons on wallpapers you fetched. The app comes over 50 widgets now, that lets you add the weather, date and time, moon phase, system information, inspirational quotes, jokes, and lots of other stuff to appear from your homescreen. You can even customize Widgets with tons of settings directly from the app.

Hologram Desktop supports Macs running macOS 10.15 Catalina or higher. It comes in Free and Pro versions. The Free version comes with 10 widgets and is limited to 5 wallpaper downloads per month, while Pro version comes with unlimited wallpaper downloads, all available widgets, 25 beautiful pre-built pro themes, and lets you save your wallpapers to your own folders. You can buy the app for $9.99 from the Mac App Store.

For 3D wallpapers: 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.

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

For free wallpapers: Unsplash Wallpaper‪s

Unsplash is one of the world’s leading providers of royalty-free, high-resolution images, offering millions of stunning photos to choose from. The Unsplash Wallpapers app brings this vast collection directly to your macOS computer, providing you with fresh, beautiful wallpapers on a regular basis. Whether you want to cycle your background every few minutes, hours, days, or weeks, this lightweight app makes it easy to keep your desktop visually dynamic. You can also manually select and change wallpapers whenever you want, with a built-in viewer that shows you a thumbnail preview before you commit.

The app offers a wide range of categories to choose from, such as Nature, Beach, Animals, Space, and Abstract. You can also explore thousands of curated collections from the Unsplash website, giving you endless options for personalization. A small limitation is that you can only add one collection at a time, so you’ll need to remove your previous selection before adding a new one. However, this doesn’t detract from the app’s ability to keep your wallpaper fresh and relevant to your tastes.

Unsplash Wallpapers is available in the Mac App store for free and doesn’t collect any personal information.

Some more wallpaper apps worth mentioning

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.

Built-in Dynamic Wallpapers on Mac

macOS offers dynamic wallpapers that change based on different settings, giving you a more personalized experience. Geographic-based wallpapers adjust according to your location and time of day, while time-based wallpapers update based on your system clock. There are also Light and Dark Mode wallpapers that switch with your system’s theme, and some even combine time, location, and mode for a fully tailored effect.

These built-in options ensure your desktop background feels fresh and in sync with your environment, without the need for third-party apps.

Dynaper – Dynamic Wallpapers

Built for photography enthusiasts, the wallpaper app for Mac allows you to easily create dynamic wallpapers, including elements such as time and solar shifting in the background, and complete compatibility with macOS Mojave, Catalina, and the latest Big Sur version too.

The helper tools built into the Dynaper makes it easier to set the timeframe for the images, or just go with the Light/Dark wallpaper modes that automatically adapt to the appearance change. We were offered the compatibility for Retina HD display MacBook and iMac the wide-gamut colors, with better hues even for darker images, matching the quality of visual experience that macOS native wallpapers provide.

Live Desktop

From the cool blue vibes of rippling water, to the gentle blows of the sandy beach, we were delighted by the entire catalog of awe-inspiring live desktop backgrounds for you to try out on the Live Wallpaper app.

Speaking of the interface, the general experience is simplified and selecting the best ones from the lot is made easy with the Featured section. Apart from live wallpapers, the app also comes with its own collection of built-in Live Audio, which allows you to enjoy pleasant tunes while you feast your eyes, and can be easily turned off at any time.

Living Wallpaper HD

Another instance where the Live Wallpaper feature from the Apple iOS has been successfully adapted into the macOS platform, Living Wallpaper HD sets the standard for beautifully crafted scenes like no other. Covering everything from the hustle and bustle of the cityscapes, to the scenic marvel of galaxies far away, Live Wallpaper HD comes with 20+ variants for you to choose from.

There is a weather and clock widget subtly integrated into the live wallpaper by itself, so the aesthetic beauty doubles up as a utility feature too. Apart from the ones provided with the app, you can also choose your very own wallpapers and customize them with the app, along with add-on features such as hot corners to activate the screensaver, and Informative Dock for a quick glance into the important stats.

Wallpaper FAQs

Q: What is a Live Wallpaper for Mac?

A live wallpaper (or dynamic wallpaper) is a desktop background that changes throughout the day, unlike a video, which would constantly consume system resources. It adjusts based on your location, date, and time settings. For example, a cityscape might transition from day to dusk and then to night, creating a subtle, yet engaging effect without draining your system power.

Q: How to set up a Dynamic Wallpaper on macOS?

The latest version of macOS, similar to the older ones, comes with a couple of Dynamic Wallpapers built into it, and here’s how you can enable them:

• On the home screen, click the Apple icon on the top-left corner of the taskbar.
• Select System settings and Choose Wallpaper from the left pane.
• Under the Dynamic Wallpapers section, you will find the available options, so select the one you prefer and it will automatically be set as the background.

Q: Where to get more dynamic wallpapers?

While there is an abundance of stunning wallpapers you can enjoy on the 5K Retina HD display of the iMac and MacBook, the number of Dynamic Wallpapers that Apple makes is fairly limited. Built for the very purpose of fulfilling the need to add more dynamic wallpapers to macOS, Dynamic Wallpaper Club is built with the finesse and style you have come to expect from Apple itself.

The crowdsourced website allows you to not only craft dynamic wallpapers of your own, but browse through a handsome catalog of wallpapers created by other users. The best part is, all of it comes to you free of cost, with the high-quality ones marked with the “5K” sticker for you to download right away.

Q: Where are macOS wallpapers stored?

macOS stores downloaded wallpapers on your Startup Disk. To find them:

1. Open Finder.
2. From the menu bar, select Go → Go to Folder or press Shift + Cmd + G.
3. Enter this path: /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/

In this folder, you’ll find various subfolders with different formats and resolutions. Your downloaded wallpapers are likely stored in one of these, typically organized by your screen resolution.

Keep your Mac’s screen fresh everyday

The best way to keep your Mac”s screen fresh every day depends on your individual needs and preferences. For dynamic, time-based changes that reflect the time of day, Backdrop or Dynamic Wallpaper Club remains a top choice. If you’re seeking a vast library of free, high-quality images, Unsplash Wallpapers is an excellent option. If you want native HD wallpapers, Wallpaper Wizard is a good option. Try one of these wallpaper apps today and give your Mac a fresh new look!