How often do you change your desktop wallpaper? Have you thought about using something elegant and pleasing to the eye instead of noisy and intense artwork? Well, you’re wasting your time on hundreds of sites that only offer wallpapers. We wrote about Wallpaper and Screen Saver apps for Macs but that was in 2015. Things have changed a lot since then.
First, it offers a more vibrant and curated collection of the latest wallpaper apps to work properly with Macs and MacBooks. Second, they remove all the clipping and resolution adjustment shenanigans. Finally, they offer a great selection of photos and the ease of switching between your favorite wallpapers without messing with the screen settings every time.
Let’s take a look at six of the best wallpaper apps for your Mac.
Note: All the apps in this list are compatible with macOS 10.15.6 Catalina. However, we do not guarantee that all will work on older macOS versions.
1. Wallpaper Wizard
Want to liven up your Mac’s desktop and expanded workspace? Your search ends in the Wallpaper Wizard 2 app, which provides over 25,000 wallpapers and collection updates each month. Categorizing and clustering wallpapers according to interests makes your search very easy. Whether you’re an art or food connoisseur, the app provides images that you can spend a day studying and studying.
All images are HD and 4K quality and make a world of difference on Retina Macs and 4K monitors. You can even create a wallpaper playlist called Roll to let the app switch between them. For users of multi-monitor setups, the application allows you to migrate them through their desktop space. You can then switch between them at regular intervals ranging from 5 minutes to 1 week. With a huge, curated, classified and jaw-dropping collection of HD wallpapers like this one, I doubt you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Wallpaper Wizard costs $9.99 from the MacPaw Store as a one-time purchase. You can pay the same amount as a monthly subscription to Setapp, an alternative store to the Mac App Store. This will give you free access to several popular (over 150) paid apps for this nominal price.
2. Splashing Wallpapers
The official Unsplash Wallpapers app is the ultimate source of royalty-free images and wallpapers to decorate your Mac desktop. Great shots of landscape and nature photography always feel like a breath of fresh air. The app offers a minimalist and simple interface to change wallpapers to Daily, Weekly or Manually.
I like the “Update on all displays and desktops” option as it’s pretty handy for people like me who connect a MacBook Air to an external desktop. This means you can automatically use the same wallpaper in a different resolution. Yes, no need for a separate wallpaper for the extended desktop area.
The Unsplash Wallpapers app is free to use and offers a gateway to the insane collection of regularly uploaded images.
3. Irvue
Irvue is quite similar to Unsplash with its handy menu bar applet. With this, you can let the app refresh photos randomly or from specific collections at predefined intervals ranging from 30 minutes to a month. Of course you can also update manually, but should you?
You can always download the wallpapers you like. Alternatively, you can add new channels apart from the usual Highlights to let the program choose wallpapers accordingly. Just like Unsplash, Irvue is free to download and use.
4. DailyWall
DailyWall is the perfect competitor app if your choices are limited to just a few categories. You can choose wallpapers from categories such as Landscapes, Weather, 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 Jump limit. Yes, you can only skip one photo per day. You can set the same wallpaper to your devices, domains, favorites, iCloud sync, etc. You can pay $4.99 per month to enjoy features like syncing between DailyWall, its collection of Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay.
5. wall cat
Don’t let the word cat in the name fool you. The Wallcat app offers a handpicked collection of photos that are updated daily. The nice thing about this app is that it is only 7.5 MB in size.
You can choose from five different ‘channels’ to choose the one that suits your mood. Light and Dark gradient channels are only available on Macs running macOS 10.15 Catalina and later.
Wallcat is one of those honest apps that gives full credit to the original creator of the photo image. The menu bar icon gives you access to that creator’s profile from the drop-down menu. Wallcat can be purchased for $1.99 from the Mac App Store.
NASA Picture of Day 6
As the name suggests, the purpose of the app is simple – to bring you a new high resolution photo every day. The coolest thing about this app is that each picture comes with a description written by a professional astronomer. You can download these amazing images of the area or continue to enjoy a new one every day.
The only possible downside here is that sometimes photos are in a different aspect ratio and won’t fit on your desktop background. For example, I had a hard time adjusting a few images with the 1400×900 aspect ratio of my MacBook Pro. The same images looked beautiful on an extended 4K or ultrawide monitor with USB C for Macs. The app comes with a free 10-day trial, after which you can pay $10 per year to continue using it to feed your space-related enthusiasm.
I have often downloaded and used the wallpapers recommended in our compilations in the past, at the expense of seeming insensitive. However, most did not match the native resolution of the MacBook Air. Also, I wanted something that looked elegant and professional.
Bonus: Hologram Desktop
Hologram Desktop is a smart app for those who want one app access to all scenic wallpapers and awesome widgets. The app curates nearly 5 million wallpapers from Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels. You get five pre-loaded themes that you can apply and use instantly. Themes are basically a combination of wallpapers and widgets that appear on the dashboard.
You can edit the theme by getting more wallpapers from Unsplash, Pixabay or Pexels. You can then program these images to loop at hourly, daily, or weekly intervals. You can also add widgets by choosing from over 25 customizable widgets that will appear on your home screen. You’ll find a variety of widgets, from showing your system information to weather details. The Hologram Desktop app supports Macs running macOS 10.15 Catalina or later. You can purchase the app for $9.99 from the Mac App Store.
You can browse through our goldmine of curated wallpaper posts by clicking the Tag link below.
A New Beginning Every Day
These Wallpaper apps for Mac can transform your desktop in just a few clicks and add to the visual enjoyment. The convenience of automatically changing a wallpaper every day or quickly choosing a wallpaper without opening a browser is priceless.
Next: Struggling with speed and basic tasks on your Mac? Click on the next link to check out useful macOS apps to optimize your Mac.
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