How do I get a moving wallpaper on a Mac?

System Settings → Wallpaper, then choose one of the moving films rather than a still. On macOS 14 and later they play on the desktop, not only as a screen saver, and nothing has to be installed first.

Are animated, live and moving wallpapers the same thing?

In everyday use, yes — all three mean a desktop background that moves. The one genuine distinction is between video and a dynamic desktop, where a still image is swapped for another as the day progresses.

Can I use my own video as a moving wallpaper?

Not through System Settings, which accepts pictures rather than video files. Playing an arbitrary clip needs an app that paints its own window over the desktop, which is a different job from playing the films macOS already has.

Do moving wallpapers drain the battery?

Far less than people expect when the film runs on the hardware decoder rather than the CPU. What matters is when playback stops: a well-behaved player pauses under a full-screen window, on lock, on sleep and on heat, and halves its rate on Low Power Mode.

How many moving wallpapers does macOS include?

152 Aerial films — landscapes, cities, the ocean floor and the curve of the Earth from orbit. Skywall lists every one of them and plays any on every display.

Do they work on an external monitor?

Yes, and on several at once. Each display gets the film at full resolution; the footage is a 4K master, so a 27-inch panel is not being fed something upscaled from a laptop screen.

Guide

Moving wallpapers on a Mac, and the kind you already have.

Three different things get called a moving wallpaper. Only one of them is video, and your Mac shipped with 152 of those.

Three kinds of movement

Search for an animated wallpaper and the results mix all three together, which is why the advice you find contradicts itself. They behave differently and they cost different amounts to run.

Stills that shift with the clock: One image file holding a dozen versions of the same scene, from dawn to night. macOS fades between them as the day goes by. Nothing actually moves — catch it at any single moment and it is a photograph.
Aerial films, shot from a helicopter and from orbit: Real 4K video, running behind your windows and continuing into the screen saver. macOS ships 152 of them and puts a handful in front of you. This is the only kind that moves while you watch.
Video played by an app you install: A third-party player paints your own clip, or a downloaded one, onto the desktop. It is the flexible option and the expensive one: the app has to keep a video surface alive for as long as your Mac is awake.

Switching one on

1
Open System Settings, then Wallpaper
It sits next to Screen Saver, because the two have shared one library since macOS 14. Scroll past the stills and the flat colours.
2
Pick a film from the moving rows
The first click starts a background download of a 4K master, so the desktop may sit on a still frame for a minute while it lands.
3
Decide what the screen saver does
The same film can carry on when the Mac goes idle, which is the setting that makes the transition look like nothing happened at all.
4
Reach the ones the pane never lists
What you can see is a curated subset. The other films are in the manifest macOS already reads, and any of them will play — the picker simply does not offer them.

Animated, live, moving — one thing or three?

One thing, in practice. The words came from different places: phones popularised “live”, Windows software popularised “animated”, and “moving” is what most people say when they are not quoting a product. None of them names a separate feature on a Mac.

The distinction worth keeping is the one above. A dynamic desktop is a photograph that gets replaced on a schedule; an Aerial film is video. If you want the desktop to move while you are looking at it, you want the second.

Your own clips and GIFs

That is a genuinely different job, and worth saying plainly: the Wallpaper pane takes pictures, so a video file of yours cannot go in it. Software exists that paints a window over the desktop and plays whatever you hand it. Skywall is not that — it hands the system a film the system already understands, which is why it is cheap to run and leaves nothing behind when you remove it.

What it costs the machine

The frames go through the same hardware block macOS uses for its own screen saver, so the CPU barely participates and the numbers you see in Activity Monitor look implausibly low. The part that decides your battery life is not the decoding, it is the stopping: playback should end the moment a full-screen window covers the desktop, when the display sleeps, when the Mac locks and when it runs hot.

Browse all 152 films to see what is sitting on your disk unused.

Questions

How do I get a moving wallpaper on a Mac?: System Settings → Wallpaper, then choose one of the moving films rather than a still. On macOS 14 and later they play on the desktop, not only as a screen saver, and nothing has to be installed first.
Are animated, live and moving wallpapers the same thing?: In everyday use, yes — all three mean a desktop background that moves. The one genuine distinction is between video and a dynamic desktop, where a still image is swapped for another as the day progresses.
Can I use my own video as a moving wallpaper?: Not through System Settings, which accepts pictures rather than video files. Playing an arbitrary clip needs an app that paints its own window over the desktop, which is a different job from playing the films macOS already has.
Do moving wallpapers drain the battery?: Far less than people expect when the film runs on the hardware decoder rather than the CPU. What matters is when playback stops: a well-behaved player pauses under a full-screen window, on lock, on sleep and on heat, and halves its rate on Low Power Mode.
How many moving wallpapers does macOS include?: 152 Aerial films — landscapes, cities, the ocean floor and the curve of the Earth from orbit. Skywall lists every one of them and plays any on every display.
Do they work on an external monitor?: Yes, and on several at once. Each display gets the film at full resolution; the footage is a 4K master, so a 27-inch panel is not being fed something upscaled from a laptop screen.

Next: where the other 152 films are, andthe pixel size every Mac screen wants.