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This tutorial should be pretty straightforward. Wallpapers are a form of expression; people change them all the time for various reasons. Personally, the more challenging thing to do is to find actually good wallpapers versus actually setting them. Still, macOS has a few different methods to change the wallpaper. Here they are.

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To change your wallpaper on Mac, find the image you want to use as your background in Finder. Then, Command+Click on the image to show the context menu and select Set Desktop Picture. The image will become your background.

There are actually several different ways to do this. We’ll quickly run through each method to change the wallpaper on any Mac.

This is kind of the macOS hub for switching wallpapers and the one we recommend using if you’re looking for maximum customization.

This is a much easier method, but it only works with a single image file at once. A lot of folks use this to apply wallpapers they downloaded.

This is my preferred method. I usually download images for use as wallpapers, and I can set them pretty quickly this way without much hassle.

Macs have a few different ways to customize your wallpaper experience. We’ll briefly go through the methods on how to set various wallpaper customizations.

Dynamic wallpapers change on their own over the course of the day. The most common ones you’ll find are default macOS wallpapers of cityscapes or landscapes that change colors based on what time it is where you are. It’s actually really cool, and it isn’t as distracting as a live wallpaper while still giving you that effect. Here’s how to use them.

We may make a longer tutorial for this eventually, but here is where to find and how to use live wallpapers on macOS.

Having the proper resolution and aspect ratio is important when setting a wallpaper. Your background will look blurry if the image is too low of a resolution, and it’ll look stretched and warped if it isn’t the correct aspect ratio.

To help take some of the guesswork out of it, we’ve included a helpful list of Macs and MacBooks along with their native resolutions and aspect ratios. That should help make it easier to find nice, sharp, properly sized wallpapers for your Mac.

The aspect ratio includes the full area where a wallpaper will be seen. Some Macbook Pros have a notch. In those cases, the aspect ratio represents the screen under the notch and menu bar where the wallpaper will actually be seen.

If you have an external display that you purchased yourself, you’ll have to check with the manufacturer to see that display’s resolution and aspect ratio for properly sized wallpapers.

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Usually, it’s because the image you used is too low of a resolution or in the wrong aspect ratio. Low-resolution images can look grainy or blurry on higher resolution displays, while wrongly shaped wallpapers can look stretched or warped.

Any image can be a wallpaper, so anywhere you can find pretty images is a place where you can find pretty wallpapers. We recommend looking in the Mac App Store for wallpaper apps or searching for high-resolution Mac wallpapers on Google.

Subjectively, that’s entirely up to you since it’s a visual thing, and people like different visual things. However, we can say objectively that the best wallpapers will be of a similar (or higher) resolution and the same aspect ratio as your Mac or MacBook’s screen. That will deliver maximum sharpness and minimal warping or blurring.

Not natively, no. However, with apps like DynaPaper, you may be able to convert one into a live wallpaper if you really want to.

Apple does a lot of this work for you by automatically finding images when you’re in the Desktop and Screen Saver window. Your best bet is just to stash your wallpaper images into a wallpaper folder and let the Desktop and Screen Saver app do the rest.