Up next in 10
How To Use A Screensaver As A Wallpaper
Mar 11, 2025
For the Terminal lines see here: http://www.cultofmac.com/143738/use-a-screensaver-as-your-desktop-wallpaper-video-how-to/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter
View Video Transcript
0:04
hey everyone today I'm going to show you
0:05
how you can use your screen saver as a
0:07
desktop wallpaper so normally you have
0:09
your you know choice of however many
0:11
desktops and while it's fine for a while
0:14
and you can always find new pictures
0:15
once while you might want to change it
0:16
up get a little more uh Fancy with your
0:19
desktop so what you can do is you can
0:22
actually set your desktop background as
0:25
a screen saver now there's two ways you
0:27
can do this and I'm going to show you
0:28
both of them today the first way is
0:30
using terminal so if you don't like
0:32
running third party programs in the
0:33
background or whatever you can use
0:35
terminal it's a little more difficult
0:37
cuz you have to run lines of code every
0:38
time you want to do it and when you
0:40
close terminal the background changes
0:43
back to your regular wallpaper but it
0:45
also works so I'm going to show you that
0:47
first just in case you'd want to do it
0:49
that way I'm going to open up a new
0:51
finder window and I'm going to go to
0:53
Macintosh HD applications utilities and
0:57
then of course terminal once I can find
0:59
it here
1:00
now there's two rather lengthy lines of
1:02
code that you're going to have to paste
1:03
in the terminal so I'm going to have
1:05
them below the video If you want to get
1:07
them and I'm just going to paste them in
1:10
here but you'll have to type CD space
1:13
and then I'm going to copy and paste
1:16
this first line of code all this does is
1:17
set it to the directory with your screen
1:20
savers in them and now that you're in
1:22
the directory there's a second line of
1:24
code that you paste that activates the
1:25
screen saver and the screen saver that's
1:27
active is the one that you have
1:29
currently set in in system preferences
1:31
so I paste this and you can see once I
1:33
hit enter that my background turns into
1:36
my screen saver now if you notice a drop
1:38
in frames a little bit of leg it is kind
1:41
of CPU intensive especially depending on
1:44
what kind of screen saver you have set
1:45
up and plus I do have three monitors
1:47
that are all pushing this as well and I
1:49
have several different applications
1:50
running on top so it probably will slow
1:52
down your system a little bit now to
1:54
stop this all I have to do is hit contrl
1:57
C and it's done and that's kind of the
2:00
issue with this you always have to have
2:01
terminal you know open somewhere even if
2:03
you minimize it and if you hit control C
2:05
it's done if you quit terminal it's over
2:07
as well so I figured there had to be a
2:09
better way to go about this so I found
2:11
this neat application called wallsaver
2:13
you can get it from wallsaver
2:15
app.com and you can just hit download
2:18
here it's a small file and it does
2:20
pretty much the same thing as terminal
2:21
but it's a lot easier because you don't
2:22
have to worry about uh copying and
2:24
pasting code so here I've got walls
2:26
saver open and all I have to do is hit
2:29
activate
2:30
and it'll do the same thing as terminal
2:32
but now you can see it's not using the
2:34
same screen savers I had before that's
2:36
cuz if you go into preferences you can
2:38
actually choose the screen saver you
2:40
want so let's say I want Spectrum
2:42
instead I can select that then I can hit
2:45
restore and then activate again and
2:47
it'll activate it with the new screen
2:49
saver in mind so this could actually be
2:51
pretty useful if you had like an RSS
2:53
type of thing going on and you wanted to
2:55
see your RSS feeds as they come in and
2:58
now the nice thing about walls saver is
3:00
I can close the window and it appears
3:02
that the program is not running uh but
3:04
yet it still runs and that's an
3:06
advantage it has over using terminal so
3:08
whatever method you want to do is fine
3:11
if you just want to do something
3:11
temporary it might be easier just to use
3:13
terminal once but either way there's two
3:16
methods you can do and there's actually
3:18
other third party programs out there
3:20
that do the same thing as this does I
3:22
just found that this one worked pretty
3:24
nice so I chose that one so there's how
3:25
you can set your desktop wallpaper as a
3:27
screen saver in Mac OS 10 if you have
3:30
anything that you'd like to see me do
3:31
howto on make sure to send me an email I
3:33
hope you found this video useful thank
3:34
you for
3:35
watching
#Online Goodies
#Skins
# Themes & Wallpapers
#Software