How To Create Your Own Dynamic Wallpapers On MacOS.
If you’ve had a macOS computer for a while, you know what dynamic wallpapers are. These are the ones that change depending on the time of day. Thus, dark wallpapers will be displayed at night and light wallpapers during the day.
This can be extremely useful if you are browsing the web at night. Dark wallpapers will reduce screen glow and make it easier to focus your eyes.
What do you need to do if you want to create your own dynamic wallpapers instead of using only the default ones provided by Apple? Good news: there is a free Dynaper app for that.
How to use Dynaper
Before getting started, it should be noted that in the free version the watermark is placed in the lower right corner of the screen, like this.
Upgrading to Pro (which removes the watermark) can be quite expensive. But when I finally installed the ready-made dynamic wallpaper on my Macbook screen, most of the watermarks were actually cropped!
So for me the watermark is not a big problem. But you may have a different opinion on this and are willing to pay about twenty dollars for an upgrade.
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Make the background
In fact, you can add as many images as you like to the dynamic wallpaper and your Mac will switch to the next in sequence at the time you specify. But for the purposes of this article, I’ll keep it simple and take only two images – one for daytime and one for nighttime.
When you open Dynaper, the main window will open for you.
This is a very simple and straightforward application. Definitely no rocket science. Just put your wallpapers together that you want to combine into one super dynamic background and place them in the left window. Or use the + symbol to go straight to Finder.
If any of the images are in the wrong order, you can drag and drop them in the correct order with your mouse or trackpad.
I have selected a new wallpaper that should appear in the next version of macOS (Catalina). One is light and the other is dark. It’s time to specify at what time each version should run on the desktop.
You can click “Autocomplete Time”, but in my experiments, the time didn’t work. So with daylight, I just double-clicked on it and two arrows appeared allowing me to change the time to 8:00.
Make sure every image you upload to Dynaper has the correct time stamp. If not, please correct. Then when everything looks good, click Export HEIC to load a new dynamic wallpaper.
You can choose Set Image as Wallpaper or, when the HEIC is saved, right-click it and select Set Desktop Image.
HEIC (which is an image format for Apple) will become your desktop wallpaper and should change at the time you specify.
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