Wallper 1.12.0

Playlists that follow your day, music on real turntables, a Lock Screen that looks after itself — and the whole app in your language.

Playlists can change your wallpaper by the time of day. The music wallpapers got photographed turntables, lyrics that stay in time, and type set the way Apple Music sets it. The Lock Screen works without a trip to System Settings. Nine languages now cover every screen. And underneath all of it, the app is much lighter on your Mac.

Playlists

Four kinds of playlist, picked when you create one.
- All Day — your wallpapers take turns all day.
- Day & Night — one wallpaper by day, another by night.
- Dynamic — as many times as you like, each with its own wallpaper.
- Light & Dark — one wallpaper for light appearance, one for dark, switching the moment your Mac does.
Day and night can follow the sun. Sunrise and sunset are worked out for your time zone, or you can set any time yourself.
Set times the way you like. Type 1430 or 2:30 pm and press Return, or scroll over the hours and minutes.
Times no longer need gaps between them. If two share a minute, the one you set last wins.
The editor tells you what happens next — until when a time plays, and which wallpaper follows.
A page that reads like a music app. Every playlist has a cover header with Play and Stop, and the All Day list shows round previews with category, author, duration and resolution. The page comes in the same three steps as Home and Explore.
Drag rows to reorder. The ⋯ menu on a row plays it now, sets it as wallpaper, or removes it.
Covers you can read at a glance. A playlist's cover is a small stack of its own wallpapers — the one playing in front, the next ones peeking out behind. Day & Night and Dynamic covers change through the day, just like your desktop.
Adding wallpapers is obvious. Pick a time (or Day/Night) on the playlist page and choose from the library right below it. Every wallpaper's ⋯ and right-click menu has Add to Playlist.
Playlists survive sleep, wake and time-zone changes.
An empty time keeps the previous wallpaper instead of leaving you with a blank desktop.
Duplicate, rename and delete from the playlist page or the list.

Music wallpapers (Media Sync)

Turntable and Glass Turntable. Built on a photographed deck and tonearm. The record slides out of its sleeve, the arm swings in and lowers, and the needle tracks the grooves to the end of the song. When the song changes, the sleeve flips to the next album.
Vinyl and Record are back, and Sleeve is new — the album sleeve with the record half out. Records are drawn photorealistically.
Twelve layouts in all. Cassette and Reel are gone.
Split melts the album cover into its own colours, with no visible seam.
Type set the way Apple Music sets it. Titles are semibold, artists regular, and both are sized to the artwork they sit by, in every layout. The serif title is gone, and so are the text shadows and the "NOW PLAYING" caption.
Lyrics read like Apple Music's. Twice the air between lines, the lines that aren't current kept readable but out of focus, the current one held a little above centre, and a slow spring when the song moves on. An instrumental break shows three breathing dots.
Artwork tiles are nearly square, with no outline, and the caption under them is small and left-aligned.
Lyrics stay in time. Fixed lyrics that lagged by seconds — or by minutes after another app briefly took over "now playing". The song's position is re-checked against Spotify and Apple Music every few seconds.
Lyrics are fetched for every song and matched line by line.
Songs change cleanly in the Lyrics and Verse layouts. The old lines leave the moment the next song starts, and the new ones fade in when they arrive. No more jumping to the album cover and back while they load — only a song that truly has no lyrics shows the cover.
You choose what Media Sync listens to. Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music are on. Everything else stays off until you switch it on.
Other apps appear in the list the first time they play something — a voice message, a video call — with their icon, switched off. Before, anything not in the list was always let through.
The Music tab shows the real thing. Layout previews use the last song you played, in the colours of its own cover, exactly as the desktop would show it.
Choosing a layout turns Media Sync on, and the header shows what's playing.

Lock Screen and Screen Saver

No more System Settings. Turn on Also use it as my Lock Screen and Screen Saver — in Settings, in the dock, or during the welcome tour — and your current wallpaper goes there straight away.
One entry, not a pile. Wallper keeps a single wallpaper in System Settings › Wallpaper and changes it in place. Old Wallper entries are cleaned up.
Wallpapers don't freeze there. A video plays for an hour at a stretch instead of stopping on its last frame.
Music on the Lock Screen keeps up with every song, even while the screen is locked or the screen saver is running. It shows the song's colours as a moving gradient, whatever layout is on your desktop, and is rendered once per song.
You can see what it is doing. The progress card shows every step: waiting for the desktop, rendering with a percentage, installing, restarting the wallpaper service.
Switching layouts is quick. A layout change waits only for its own animation, the same picture is never rendered twice, and the wallpaper service restarts once instead of twice.
An install you overtake stops at once — even mid-conversion — and its card comes down, so the work goes to whatever you chose last.
Repair Lock Screen and Screen Saver. One button in Settings puts macOS's own wallpaper list back and restarts the wallpaper service, if something outside Wallper ever breaks it.

Your language

Nine languages now cover the whole app: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian and Simplified Chinese.
Every screen is included — settings, playlists, the menu bar, the welcome tour, alerts, notifications and the launch screen. Before, about half of what you saw fell back to English.
Parts of the app could never be translated at all — sorting, greetings, dock tooltips, the progress card, the Lock Screen steps. They can now.
Terms follow Apple's own wording on each system: Lock Screen, Screen Saver, Login Items, Mission Control, System Settings.
Counted things use each language's own plural forms instead of one catch-all phrase.
The macOS permission prompt is translated too — the one that asks for access to Music and Spotify.
Your language comes from macOS. Nothing to choose in the app; you can also set a language for Wallper alone in System Settings › General › Language & Region › Applications.

Wallpapers and displays

One display, no dialog. Set as Wallpaper applies straight away. The display chooser appears only when there is more than one.
Wallpaper changes melt into each other. The new wallpaper starts playing underneath first, then fades in over the old one, which keeps playing until the fade is done. No black frame, no blink — even for videos that open on a dark frame.
The same soft fade everywhere: pressing Next, a playlist moving on by the clock, your Mac switching appearance.
Menu bar and dock previews switch in step with the desktop, not a moment ahead of it.
"Render wallpapers at" now changes what you see. macOS has no way to play a video file at a lower resolution, so the setting had nothing to act on. Wallpapers larger than the size you pick are now given a smaller copy of themselves, written once with the hardware encoder and kept, so 1440p or 720p really is less work for your Mac.
"Lower quality on battery" does the same while you're unplugged. A wallpaper that already fits is left exactly as it is, and copies for a size you no longer use are cleared away.
Battery, full-screen apps and a busy Mac pause and resume the wallpaper exactly when they should — and the app never pauses a wallpaper you just started by hand.
Each display can be turned off on its own, and it stays off — and comes back when you turn it on again.
Your monitor keeps its wallpaper. Unplugging a display no longer forgets which wallpaper was on it.

The app window

Switching tabs is a quick crossfade instead of a jump.
Pages keep their place, search and scroll position when you come back to them.
A page you open for the first time is built before the fade, so it no longer stutters in.
Filters are glass everywhere — My Media, playlists, the Explore categories — with the selected one in your accent colour.
My Media is a proper table. Every column has one width for the header and every row, the gutters match, and the values start at the same edge — category, author, duration, resolution, size and likes read as columns. A playlist's All Day list uses the same grid.
Rows have a ⋯ menu on hover and don't shift under the pointer.
Sorting is calm. Click a heading and the lines stay where they are while their contents change over, instead of rows sliding past each other. The heading you sorted by shows a small arrow.
Search finds wallpapers by resolution. Typing 5k, 8k, 1440p or fullhd works like any other search word.
Press Return in the search window to open Explore with those results.
The Queue page has a centred header, a chip row that fades at its edges, and a native menu for auto-advance.
Glass buttons respond on their whole surface, not just on the icon.
A share page for any wallpaper — a public link with a preview and a short guide for installing Wallper.

Menu bar and dock

The panel opens the way it always has, a little narrower, and the play/pause button shows the right state from the first frame instead of flicking over.
Like and list sit beside the play button, with Previous and Next appearing between them only when there is somewhere to go. The dock hides them the same way.
It says where your wallpaper comes from. Under the name sits a capsule with the source and what will change it: "Playlist 4 · Night until 7:00 AM", "Liked · 12 wallpapers", "Set by hand · pick a playlist". Click it to open the list of sources.
The list of sources is glass. The chips share one surface, the one that plays is in your accent colour, and the playlist that plays comes first when the list opens. Playlists are created in the Playlists tab.
Shuffle from the dock. The dock's shuffle button starts and stops shuffling at the pace you used last; right-click it to choose how often.
Click the wallpaper's name for display and Lock Screen settings.
The menu bar can take its colour from your wallpaper — a still version of it sits behind everything so the menu bar and Mission Control match.

Settings

Wallpaper settings are simpler. Battery is one choice — keep playing, pause when the battery is low, or pause whenever unplugged — with the threshold shown only when it applies.
Full screen is one choice too, and pausing only the covered display is the default.
The "wait before starting" knob is gone — the new transition makes it pointless.
The Lock Screen follows shuffle by default.
Two settings that don't explain themselves have a small mark beside them — full screen and a busy Mac — that says what they do on hover, in one sentence, with the real numbers.
One thing at a time on the desktop. A playlist, Media Sync and a wallpaper you set by hand no longer fight: whichever you choose last takes the desktop and the other two switch themselves off.
Stop on a playlist that took over from music goes back to the wallpaper you had before the music.
Storage starts with the total cache and a Clear all caches button. Lyrics have their own section with a size and a delete button.
Imported videos are never counted as cache, so the totals are what clearing actually frees. Sizes under a megabyte show in KB.
A log file for support. defaults write sandimax.Wallper logToFile -bool YES makes the app write its log to ~/Library/Logs/Wallper/Wallper.log from the next launch.
The progress card is a piece of glass in the corner. It shows what is being installed and which step it is on, wherever you are in the app. The ring fills as the work moves along and closes into a check at the end, and two cards at once behave as one surface.

Performance

A fraction of the resources. On a 5K display with a wallpaper playing, Wallper used about a quarter of a core and close to 300 MB. It now sits at a few percent and around 100 MB less.
A muted wallpaper no longer decodes and mixes its silent audio track.
A minimized, hidden or covered window rests — its hero video and previews stop until it is back in view.
Previews are decoded no larger than the card that shows them, so a 4K file behind a small card costs a small card's worth.
Thumbnails decode off the main thread, at the size they are shown, instead of at full 1920×1080 — that was most of the memory at launch.
Album covers are decoded no larger than they are ever shown. A 3000-pixel cover was 36 MB on its own.
The scrolling title in the dock is animated by Core Animation instead of being stepped by SwiftUI every frame, which kept the whole window laying out.
The live gradient behind Media Sync is drawn by a renderer of its own, on a thread of its own, at a fraction of the pixels. It looks the same and the main thread doesn't notice it.
The Lock Screen render keeps only a few frames in flight instead of as many as the encoder would take.
The scripts that ask Music and Spotify where a song is are compiled once and reused, instead of being compiled again every few seconds.
A wallpaper that had to start from the network used to stream from the server for as long as it stayed up. It now downloads the file and moves onto it.
Launch no longer reads every saved preview; each is checked in the background the first time it is shown.
Scrolling Home or a wallpaper's page redraws only what moves. Spinners and indicators run on Core Animation.
The library is indexed for instant lookups.
Retired wallpaper windows are closed, not just hidden — each one held a backing store the size of your display for the life of the app.

Fixed

Wallpapers could stay frozen after sleep — and the menu bar's play button couldn't revive them; only setting a new wallpaper worked. Playback is checked after waking and the wallpaper rebuilt if it didn't start.
Unplugging a monitor could permanently forget which wallpaper belonged to it, so plugging it back in left it blank.
The progress card moved sideways, and off the window's edge, when a wallpaper's page was open.
The Lock Screen progress card appeared for the first song only; every card after it was held back by the one before.
Quit did nothing while a sheet was open — the license panel, Add to Playlist, the display chooser.
The window could come up grey, with the app still behind, when opened from the menu bar or the Dock, and clicking inside didn't bring it forward.
Wallpapers were drawn on a surface smaller than the display asked for, so a 5K desktop could be rendered below 1080p.
A quality change reverted after one loop: only the frame on screen was capped, and the next copy of the video went back to the old setting.
A wallpaper set by hand could come up frozen on its first frame, having inherited a pause you had already lifted.
A wallpaper whose file was slow to open could replace a working one with a black screen after eight seconds. What is playing now stays until the new one really has a picture.
A wallpaper that stalled — usually one still streaming — stayed paused for good. It is rebuilt now.
Turning a display's wallpaper off in Settings didn't stick: it came back after sleep, after reconnecting the display, or at the next launch.
A display that blinked out for a moment while the Mac woke had its wallpaper torn down and rebuilt, with a black flash and its pause state lost.
A window zoomed to fill the screen counted as a full-screen app, so wallpapers paused behind an ordinary maximised window.
The menu bar preview showed another display's wallpaper for a display that had none.
Stop on a playlist switched the desktop to the Liked queue instead of stopping, and a few minutes later shuffle started changing wallpapers again.
Changing the wallpaper of the part of the day that was playing left the old one on the desktop until the next change.
Setting a wallpaper by hand never stopped shuffle or a playlist, and Media Sync never stopped a playlist.
Waking the Mac or reconnecting a display could switch shuffle off.
Shuffle switched itself off when it landed on an interactive wallpaper, and stayed off after relaunch in some cases.
Choosing a gradient scene didn't stop shuffle or a playlist, so it was replaced at their next change.
Pressing Next several times in a row could leave an old wallpaper playing, hidden, behind the new one.
After Media Sync was turned off, a playlist that had moved on meanwhile showed the wallpaper from before the music.
Turning Media Sync off could leave the music wallpaper on screen when no wallpaper had been set before, and left Wallper using CPU in the background until it was quit.
Media Sync could keep running for a song that had stopped, when the player quit rather than paused.
Quitting while a music wallpaper was on could leave a cut-off video on the Lock Screen.
The Lock Screen could keep the previous song's picture for good if a render was dropped at the last moment.
Upgrading could switch off music sources you had on, and anything playing on the web was off by default.
Switching a music source off in React to changed nothing: Wallper still asked Music and Spotify directly at launch, after waking, and whenever Media Sync was switched on, so a player you had turned off still took the desktop. Switching one on now also picks up what is already playing, instead of waiting for the next song.
A download the server refused was saved as a broken wallpaper.
A crash when a music player reported no playback rate.
Many smaller fixes to layout, hover states and logging.

Good to know

macOS 14.6 or later. Lock Screen and Screen Saver wallpapers need macOS 26.
Your settings carry over from earlier versions.
Wallpapers you have already downloaded are not downloaded again.

alxndlk/wallper-app 1.12.0 on GitHub