How to Put a Live Wallpaper on Your Mac Lock Screen

The short answer, before anything else: macOS can already play a video on your lock screen. It has been able to since macOS 14. What it will not do is let you choose your own video. The Wallpaper pane in System Settings offers Apple's own moving wallpapers, and for anything else it offers a still picture.

So the question splits in two, and most pages that answer it only answer the first half. Getting a moving lock screen at all takes about thirty seconds and costs nothing. Getting your moving lock screen is a different job, because of where macOS keeps that catalog and what it will accept into it.

Both halves are below. Fair warning about who is writing this: I make a Mac wallpaper app, so I have an obvious interest in your conclusion. The free route is genuinely the right answer for a lot of people and it is written out in full first, with the exact clicks, so you can stop there.

Part one: the moving lock screen macOS already has

Apple ships a set of video wallpapers, called aerials. Landscapes, cityscapes, the earth from orbit. They play when you wake the Mac, and then settle onto a still frame once you are at the desktop.

1. Open System Settings.
2. Click Wallpaper in the sidebar.
3. Pick anything under Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater, or Earth. These are the video ones.
4. Lock the screen with Control, Command, Q to see it.

That is the whole thing. No download, no third-party software, nothing to configure. If what you wanted was motion on the lock screen rather than a specific video, you are done.

Two behaviours surprise people here, and neither is a fault. The video plays on the lock screen and on wake, not continuously while you work. And the categories that are not videos, like Colors or your own Photos, will give you a still lock screen no matter what else you change.

Part two: why there is no button for your own video

Scroll the Wallpaper pane looking for an Add or Import button and you will not find one. You can add your own photos. You cannot add your own aerial. That is a deliberate gap in the interface rather than a bug, and it is the reason this question keeps getting asked.

Underneath, the thing System Settings is reading is not mysterious. The aerials macOS knows about live in a folder in your own Library:

~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.wallpaper/aerials/

Alongside the video files there is a manifest, a file called entries.json, which is the index System Settings actually reads to build that list. A video sitting in the folder with no entry in the manifest does not appear. An entry in the manifest pointing at a video that is really there does appear, in a category of its own.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is why third-party software can extend a list Apple gives you no button to extend. It is also why this is fiddlier than it sounds by hand: the manifest is a system file, and an app that is sandboxed for the App Store cannot simply reach into that path and start writing.

Part three: putting your own video there

This is what Vivid Walls does, and I am going to describe the actual steps rather than sell it, including the awkward one.

Pick a wallpaper, choose Export to Lock Screen, and pick a length. The choices are 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or 2 minutes. It renders at 30 frames per second, up to 4K, and writes the result into that aerials folder with a matching manifest entry under a Vivid Walls category. After that it shows up in System Settings, in the same list as Apple's own, and you select it the same way.

The awkward step is the first one. Because the app is sandboxed, it cannot write to that folder without your say so, and Apple does not grant blanket access to system directories. So the first export opens a folder chooser asking you to grant access to the aerials folder. The dialog pre-selects the correct folder already, so it is one click on Grant Access without navigating anywhere. It is asked once and remembered after that.

Worth knowing about what happens afterwards: the video is copied into the macOS catalog, so from that point macOS plays it. Vivid Walls does not have to be running for the lock screen to work. The exported file is an ordinary video in Apple's own folder, and it stays there until you remove it.

Vivid Walls is $9.99 once, no subscription, and needs macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon. Vivid Walls is not free, and I am not going to pretend the free route above does not exist.

What makes a good lock screen clip

A few things that are true regardless of which app you use:

• Longer is not better. The lock screen is on for a few seconds at a time. A 15 or 30 second loop is usually a better watch than two minutes you never reach the end of.
• Slow motion beats fast motion. Drifting fog, falling snow and slow water read well at a glance. Anything with a hard cut or a fast pan looks jarring when it starts mid-loop.
• Keep the middle calm. The clock and notifications sit over the top of the picture. Detail there gets covered.
• Dark clips are friendlier at night, which is when most people see their lock screen.

If your lock screen wallpaper is not changing

This is a common enough search on its own to be worth answering. Things that usually explain it:

• You picked a still category. Colors, Photos and Dynamic Desktop pictures produce a still lock screen. Only the aerial categories move.
• You are looking at the login window, not the lock screen. Before anyone logs in, macOS shows its own background rather than yours. Lock an already logged in session with Control, Command, Q to check.
• Your Mac is on battery and in Low Power Mode. macOS reduces motion in places when power is short.
• The wallpaper is set on one display only. Wallpaper is per display, and the lock screen follows your main one.
• You are below macOS 14. Video lock screens arrived in macOS 14. On macOS 13 and earlier there is no aerial list to choose from.

Common questions

Can you set a live wallpaper on the Mac lock screen?

Yes. macOS 14 and later include video wallpapers, called aerials, in System Settings under Wallpaper, and they play on the lock screen. Apple provides the set; there is no built-in way to add your own video to it.

Can I use my own video as a Mac lock screen?

Not through System Settings, which offers your own pictures as stills only. It is possible, because the list System Settings shows is built from a folder and a manifest file in your Library, but adding to it takes software that writes both. Vivid Walls does this by exporting a wallpaper into that folder as a 15 second to 2 minute clip.

Does the lock screen video keep playing while I use my Mac?

No. macOS plays it on wake and on the lock screen, then rests on a still frame for the desktop. A wallpaper that animates continuously on the desktop is a separate thing, covered in how to get animated wallpapers on a Mac.

Does an app have to keep running for the lock screen wallpaper?

No. Once a video is in the aerials catalog, macOS plays it from there. That is different from an animated desktop wallpaper, which does need something running to draw it.

Does a moving lock screen drain the battery?

The lock screen plays for seconds at a time rather than continuously, so it is a much smaller cost than an animated desktop. We measured the desktop case separately in do live wallpapers drain your MacBook battery.

What resolution should a Mac lock screen video be?

Match your display. Apple's own aerials are 4K, and exports from Vivid Walls go up to 3840 by 2160 at 30 frames per second. A clip smaller than your screen will be scaled up and look soft.

If you came here wanting motion on the lock screen, part one costs nothing and takes half a minute. If you came here wanting a specific video on the lock screen, the honest position is that macOS supports it and does not expose it, which is why it takes an app to do the writing. Either way, the mechanism is now visible rather than magic.

Checked against macOS behaviour and Vivid Walls 1.2.3 on August 28, 2026. Vivid Walls requires macOS 14 or later.