macOS
Make your Mac look great at any point in the day with these easy tweaks
IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes
YOU WILL LEARN How to customise your Mac’s wallpaper and screen saver
YOU’LL NEED macOS 14 or later
Genius tip!
You can use your chosen wallpaper photo as a full-screen screen saver too: just select Show As Screen Saver in Settings > Wallpaper.
One of our very favourite things about macOS Sonoma is that more than ever before, you can make your Mac perfectly you.
So you can have iPhone-style (or for older Mac users, Mac OS X Tiger-style) widgets on your desktop and Apple TV-style aerial screen savers to turn your display into an atmospheric view of incredible landscapes, dramatic skylines and beautiful natural scenes.
If you tap on Add Folder or Album, you can choose from the People smart album as well as your other Photos albums.
In this tutorial, we’re going to concentrate on two simple but really effective tweaks that make your Mac look brilliant in any room. The first is your wallpaper, which is the image or colour that lives on your Mac desktop behind your icons and your apps; this can be static, or it can change as the hours or days change. And the second is the screen saver, which is the image or video that displays when your Mac has been sitting idle for a while; you can set how long in Settings > Lock Screen.
Looking good
Although screen savers were initially designed to prevent burn-in, which used to leave a ghostly shadow on the screens of old cathode ray monitors if they showed the same thing all day long, today they’re much more about simply keeping your Mac display looking good when you’re doing something else or just having a think or well-earned break. And, as we’ll discover in this tutorial, the selection of screen savers in macOS Sonoma is the best looking, most comprehensive and most entertaining selection yet.
HOW TO Make your Mac perfectly you
To find Wallpaper settings, go to Apple menu > System Settings > Wallpaper. The currently selected wallpaper appears at the top; you’ll see other available ones as thumbnail images below. Simply click on the one you want to select it.
With dynamic wallpapers, colours change depending on the time of day or whether your Mac is in dark/light mode. To override the defaults, click on the menu (top right): the default is Automatic but you can select Light or Dark.
As
