Both of Apple’s examples map to hours in the day, but I could easily imagine a dynamic desktop image of a sunflower tracking the sun across the sky or a construction project progressing over many months. Regardless, collecting your images will be the hardest part of creating a dynamic desktop.Īs you can see in the screenshots of Apple’s dynamic desktop files above, you’ll want to name your images so their order starts at the beginning and continues through to the end-whatever beginning and end mean to you. The file format of those images also isn’t important but put them all in a folder for easy access. Just make sure they’ll look good at the full size of the screen. At one point in the betas, GraphicConverter wanted them all to have a resolution of exactly 5120 by 2880 pixels, but that doesn’t seem to be necessary anymore. The first step in making your dynamic desktop is acquiring the necessary images. This approach may provide much the same effect, but it has been available for many years-feel free to give it a try if you’re not yet running Mojave.) Building and Testing a Dynamic Desktop (You may see tutorials for making dynamic desktops merely by putting photos in a folder, selecting that folder in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Desktop > Folders, and then enabling the Change Picture checkbox and choosing an interval. GraphicConverter 10.6.5 is now available with this feature when running in Mojave. A beta of GraphicConverter arrived soon after, and we went back and forth a few times before he figured out both the image requirements and the necessary metadata to make it all work. When I pointed out that the Dynamic Desktop feature seemed to be a relatively simple collection of images, Thorsten promised to look into it more. Not just any expert, but the guru of image conversions and author of GraphicConverter, Thorsten Lemke. I played briefly with trying to duplicate Apple’s file and replace the images, but those experiments proved fruitless, so I turned to an expert. HEIC is the filename extension for High Efficiency Image File Format, which is an image container format-for more details, see Glenn Fleishman’s “ HEVC and HEIF Will Make Video and Photos More Efficient” (30 June 2017). I double-clicked one and it opened in Preview, showing that the main HEIC file was, in fact, a container for 16 individual HEIC images. A quick trip to /Library/Desktop Pictures revealed that Mojave’s two dynamic desktops-called “Mojave” and “Solar Gradients”-were HEIC files instead of JPEGs. 1646: Security-focused OS updates, Photos Workbench review, Mastodon client wishlist, Apple-related conferencesĪt some point during the betas of macOS 10.14 Mojave, I became curious about what was behind Mojave’s new Dynamic Desktop feature that slowly changes the desktop picture throughout the day. 1647: Focus-caused notification issues, site-specific browser examples, virtualizing Windows on M-series Macs.#1648: iPhone passcode thefts, Center Cam improves webcam eye contact, APFS Uncertainty Principle.#1649: More LastPass breach details and 1Password switch, macOS screen saver problem, tvOS 16.3.3 fixes Siri Remote bug.#1650: Cloud storage changes for Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive quirky printing problem.
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