The eight animated wallpapers included with Vivid Walls
Every wallpaper that loads the first time you open the app, with video of each one and a measured motion index, so you can see exactly what you get before you buy.
The most common question people ask before buying Vivid Walls is not about the renderer or the file formats. It is a much plainer worry: if the app is built to run Wallpaper Engine scenes, and Wallpaper Engine only exists on Windows, is the app empty on a Mac until you go and find something to put in it?
It is not. Eight animated wallpapers are built into the app and load into your library the first time you open it. You can set one as your desktop within a minute of installing, with no Windows PC, no Steam account and nothing else to download. This article is all eight of them, on video, so the answer is something you can look at rather than something you have to take our word for.
These are the actual files that ship inside the app, not recordings of a desktop and not marketing renders. What you see below is what lands in your library.
How this list is ordered
By measurement rather than by taste. Every clip was measured for how much the picture changes from one frame to the next, averaged across the whole file, then scaled so the busiest of the eight is 100. High on the list means constant motion across most of the frame. Low means something closer to a still image that breathes. Neither is better. They are different jobs, and most people end up wanting one of each.
One honest caveat, because it changed the order while this was being written. The number depends on how closely you look. Measured on a coarse grid, Cherry Blossom came out first and City Lights third; measured at nine times the detail, City Lights wins clearly and the top three swap around. Fine, scattered movement, which is most of what a city at night is doing, gets averaged away when you look at it coarsely. The figures below are the higher detail pass. The bottom of the list did not move under either method, so the quiet scenes really are quiet.
Use the index as a sort order, not a verdict. The lowest scoring wallpaper here is one of the two we use most.
The eight wallpapers
1. City Lights
An aerial night view over a hillside city, thousands of orange and white street lights packed into the frame with dark ridges behind them. It is the busiest of the eight on measurement and it is easy to see why: almost every point of light in the picture is doing something small, and there are a lot of them. It is also the only one that runs longer than nine seconds, at just under sixteen.
2. Cherry Blossom
Pink blossom shot at very shallow focus, so a few clusters sit sharp against a soft wash of everything behind them. This is the one that goes on the machine you work on. It scores high because the whole frame drifts at once, but it never asks for attention, and at a glance it reads more like a still photograph breathing than like an animation.
3. Fireplace HD
A log fire in a bare stone hearth, with flames coming off the top of the wood and a bed of embers underneath that keeps shifting colour. Warm, dark, and genuinely good on a large display in a dim room. If you want one wallpaper that makes the desktop feel like a place rather than a screen, this is it.
4. Aurora Scene
A green aurora over a still lake, mountains on the horizon, a full starfield above, and the whole thing mirrored in the water. The light moves and the reflection moves with it, which is most of the motion here. It sits in the middle of the list and, in practice, in the middle of what most people want.
5. Beach Scene
One wave running up pale sand, seen from just above, in turquoise and white. The motion is concentrated along a single line across the frame rather than spread over all of it, which is exactly why it measures lower than it feels. Watch the clip before you judge it by the number.
6. Nebula Journey
Purple and gold gas against a deep starfield, drifting slowly. Dark enough to sit under a full screen of windows without fighting them, which is the practical test most space wallpapers fail.
7. Rainy Street
A wet street at night with neon shopfronts in pink and cyan, and every sign written again upside down in the puddles. The lowest measured motion of the eight, and one of the two we reach for most often, which is the clearest evidence in this article that the index is a sort order and not a ranking of quality.
8. Dense Forest
Looking straight up through tall trunks at the sun breaking through the canopy, with hard rays of light coming down through the leaves. Almost static by measurement. On screen the rays creep, the leaves move, and it is the calmest thing in the set.
What the eight are for
They exist so that the app works on day one for someone who has never touched Wallpaper Engine and never intends to. A lot of people arrive here from a search about running Wallpaper Engine on a Mac, but plenty arrive just wanting a desktop that moves, and that person should not have to build a library before the thing they bought does anything.
They are also the honest baseline for judging performance. All eight run at 4K on Apple Silicon, pause when a fullscreen app covers the desktop, and drop their frame rate on battery, so if you want to know what a live wallpaper costs your laptop before you commit to a large scene library, these are a fair place to measure it. We wrote up what actually draws power in do live wallpapers drain your MacBook battery.
What else can go on the desktop
The eight are a starting point rather than the whole catalogue. Three other things work:
- Your own files. Video in mp4, mov, m4v and webm, GIFs, and stills in png, jpeg, heic and webp all become wallpapers, one per display if you want. There is a walkthrough in how to use your own video as a live wallpaper on Mac.
- Wallpaper Engine scene files. If you already have a library on Windows, the free companion app copies it to the Mac over your local network, with no account and no cloud. That is covered in how to import your Wallpaper Engine library to Mac.
- A different wallpaper on each display. Per monitor, not one picture stretched across everything. See can you run a different live wallpaper on each monitor.
Common questions
Do I need a Windows PC to use Vivid Walls?
No. The eight wallpapers above are built in and load on first launch, so the app is usable the moment it installs. A Windows PC only matters if you already own a Wallpaper Engine library on Steam and want to bring it across.
Are the eight included wallpapers free?
They are included at no extra cost, and now neither is the app. Vivid Walls is a free download with a 3-day trial of everything, and the eight wallpapers stay free forever. A one-time $9.99 purchase unlocks the rest of the library, no subscription.
Can I delete the ones I do not want?
Yes. They are ordinary library items once they load, so you can remove any of them and keep the rest.