Using Apple’s New Minimal M2 Wallpapers on Your Mac

Apple’s latest Macs – the MacBook Pro M2 and MacBook Air M2 – feature a new set of aesthetic wallpapers. And while you might not be able to get your hands on one of the new devices, you can still enjoy these wallpapers on your existing Mac thanks to designer extraordinaire Basic Apple Guy. Following up on his beautiful Apple x Van Gogh wallpapers and a set of spring-themed geometric designs, he’s now released the sharp Minimal M2 Ultra series in light and dark versions.

Changing your wallpaper regularly can help you stay focused and inspire creativity. Thankfully, macOS has some built-in options to make this easy for you, including the ability to quickly and easily create a wallpaper collection that cycles through pictures or colors at specific intervals (see the “Rotate through desktop picture and color” section below).

If you’d rather use an image you already have on your computer, you can choose it as your desktop picture by dragging it from a folder or Photos onto the thumbnail at the top of Wallpaper settings. You can also choose an arrangement option – such as Fill Screen, Fit to Screen, Stretch to Screen, or Center – from the pop-up menu. You can even select a specific part of the picture to show, such as an area of the sky or the foreground of a building.

For some Macs, you can also set the wallpaper to automatically rotate through pictures or colors using the drop-down menu next to each in Wallpaper settings. You can customize how frequently the images or colors cycle, as well as specify how many rotations they should do before stopping.

You can also have the wallpapers in your wallpaper collection automatically change to new ones every time you reboot or log out of your user account. You can even set a random rotation for the wallpapers in your wallpaper collection by choosing a time interval.

Lastly, you can use macOS’s native Wallpaper and Screen Saver settings to automatically find and display images that match your wallpaper size and resolution, such as landscape pictures for your Mac’s screen or an image in your Camera Roll. You can even choose to have the wallpapers in your Wallpaper and Screen Saver settings automatically change to a new picture each week, so you don’t need to think about it.

If you’d prefer to not use the wallpapers built into macOS, there are a number of third-party apps that can help you create a custom wallpaper from any picture on your Mac. Among the most popular is WallpaperCave, which offers a variety of options for selecting and displaying images as your desktop background. Some of these apps also let you browse a library of free and paid wallpapers that they’ve collected from across the web. For example, you can search for an image in the WallpaperCave database and then download it to your Mac. You can even upload your own images to the WallpaperCave community and share them with other users. papier peint m1