Customise the desktop picture on your Mac

You can choose the picture that’s displayed on your desktop. Your Mac comes with dozens of desktop pictures to choose from, or you can use your own pictures or choose a solid colour.

Tip: You can drag an image from your desktop or a folder onto the thumbnail at the top of the pane to use the image as your desktop picture.

On your Mac, choose Apple menu

> System Preferences, click Desktop & Screen Saver, then click Desktop.

On the left, find a picture or colour:

Pictures and colours that come with your Mac: Click the arrow next to Apple, then select a folder, such as Desktop Pictures or Colours, to see thumbnails of available pictures or colours.

Dynamic desktop pictures can automatically change throughout the course of the day based on your current location. If Location Services is turned off in Privacy preferences, the picture changes based on the time zone specified in Date & Time preferences.

Some dynamic desktop pictures may also provide still images so the desktop picture doesn’t distract from the light or dark appearance. For example, if you chose the dark appearance during macOS setup, the desktop picture is set to a dark still image. To use or stop using a still image (if available), click the pop-up menu, then choose an option.

Your pictures: Click the arrow next to Photos (or iPhoto if available). If your pictures are in the Pictures or another folder, click the arrow next to Folders, then select a folder.

To add a folder, click the Add button , navigate to and select the folder, then click Choose.

If you don’t see anything when you select the folder that contains your pictures, they might not have the right file format — JPEG, PICT, TIFF, PNG or HEIC. To change a picture’s format, open it in the Preview app, then save it in the new format. If pictures look fuzzy, try using larger ones, such as 1024×768 pixels.

On the right, click the picture you want to use.

The desktop immediately changes, so you can see how the picture looks. When you use one of your own pictures, you can choose to have it fill the screen, be centred or otherwise arranged. It’s easy to click around and try different pictures and arrangements until you find the one you like best.

To use all the pictures in a folder, select the “Change picture” tick box, then choose how often you want the picture to change — for example, every hour. The pictures are shown in the order they appear in the folder, or you can choose to show them in a random order.

To quickly use a picture you have in the Photos app, select the picture in Photos, click the Share button in the Photos toolbar, then choose Set Desktop Picture.

You can use a picture you see on the web as your desktop picture. Control-click the image in the browser window, then select Use Image as Desktop Picture.

Colors in PNG inconsistent between Windows and Mac

I have a PNG file on my Windows machine of a proposed logo that someone sketched out in PowerPoint. I am tasked with making a master version in Illustrator, and then saving various copies for web use, Word, etc.

The logo is a uniform red color, with white lettering. Simple enough.

Here’s my question: When I open the PNG on my Windows machine (where I have PowerPoint) and also on my Mac (where I have Illustrator), the red shade looks darker on Windows. At first I thought it might be that my crappy Dell monitors weren’t calibrated as well as my new MacBook Pro, but when I check the color with the eyedropper tool I get RGB values of (181, 10, 0) on Windows, and (188, 0, 10) on the Mac. Same PNG file, totally different colors.

What could be causing this difference? I’m not well-versed in color management profiles, is that what’s tripping this up? And how do I ensure that the final logo looks the same across different devices?

EDIT: Here is a cropped portion of the PNG in question:

• On Windows with Paint.NET, the uniform color shows up as (181, 10, 0)
• On Mac OS X with Pixelmator, the uniform color shows up as (188, 0, 10)
• On Mac OS X with Illustrator CS3, the uniform color shows up as (188, 0, 10)
• On Mac OS X with Photoshop CS3, the uniform color shows up as (181, 10, 0)

What does it show up as on your computer?

EDIT 2 I created the PNG by taking a screenshot of the logo, with the indention of tracing it in Illustrator, so this is not a problem with PowerPoint exporting badly. The problem is with the colors in the resulting PNG file.

How to open Mac image formats on Windows

I have some images from a Mac and I want view them under Windows but they don’t show automatically. Is there any software that can open them under Windows?

I’m talking about pictures and not CD/DVD images.

5 Answers 5

For some silly reason that I have yet to discover, sometimes when you have a picture (graphic) on OSX, it will maintain it’s mime type, but it won’t have an extension.

OSX will know what to do with it, but Windows won’t — since the file has no extension.

Make sure the file has an extension. Make sure the file doesn’t have ‘Hide Extension’ turned on, and ensure you see .tiff at the end of the file.

Any of the software listed here should work fine. Images are universal.

TIFF is a strange beast. It’s not actually an image format; it’s a container into which files go. A TIFF can contain several files — perhaps a high-resolution JPEG, a low-resolution thumbnail, and a text file that documents them.

That said, there has been some quasi-standardization over time. Most image apps agree on a relatively small number of image formats that can go into a TIFF. But there are still some problems. In particular, there are «Mac TIFF» and «Windows TIFF» files whose contents are sometimes not entirely compatible due to big-endian, little-endian issues.

I haven’t run into this problem recently, however, but it was huge about 10 years ago.

I use IrfanView (portable) to view my images. I switched from the default windows viewer (photo gallery) as it didn’t show my animated gifs in motion and wrote changes to images without clear confirmation. From what I’ve seen it’s the default image viewer on most folks’ windows machines.

All modern image formats are the same no matter what platform you use to create them. Maybe the files are corrupt, or the editor your using doesn’t support the file format. (I know a lot of programs don’t do .tif)

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