Driftwood 1.3.0 is readyYour wallpaper,
finally moving.
Driftwood plays your own videos and animated scenes as the wallpaper on your Mac, on every screen and on the Lock Screen. It sits in the menu bar and stays out of the way.
The background of this page is a real Driftwood wallpaper, running live. Pause it or change it from the bar at the bottom of your screen.
The app
Everything in its place.
Browse your videos and Metal scenes, build playlists, and see exactly what is playing on every display.
Your whole library
Video and Metal scenes, with the useful details up front.
Build a set. Choose the pace.
Order it, shuffle it, and decide how long each wallpaper stays.
See what is playing where.
Each display gets its own assignment and its own controls.
Tune it to your Mac.
Quality and energy controls are clear, optional, and close at hand.
What it does
Everything a wallpaper should do, and nothing it shouldn’t.
- It is the wallpaper
- Your wallpaper moves on the desktop and on the Lock Screen, in the same place a normal wallpaper goes.
- One per screen
- Give every monitor its own wallpaper, and switch between them whenever you feel like it.
- Playlists
- Group wallpapers together, choose how long each one stays up, then play or shuffle them on any screen.
- Soft transitions
- Wallpapers fade into each other instead of cutting, so a change never catches your eye.
- Your own files
- Drag in a video you already have, or press ⌘O. There is nothing to download and nothing to sign up for.
- Easy on the battery
- Have it pause when you unplug, when an app goes fullscreen, or when your Mac is working hard.
- Lives in the menu bar
- No Dock icon, no window in your way. Closing the window leaves your wallpaper playing.
- Always silent
- Wallpapers never play sound, even when the video you picked has some.
How it works
Not a window pretending to be a wallpaper.
Most live wallpaper apps float a window over your desktop and hide it behind your icons. Your real wallpaper is still under there, doing nothing. Driftwood asks macOS for the wallpaper itself.
The usual trick
A window over your desktop
It works, mostly. But it never shows up on the Lock Screen, and your Mac is drawing a wallpaper nobody will ever see.
Driftwood
The wallpaper itself
Same slot your normal wallpaper goes in, so it turns up on the Lock Screen too. If macOS will not hand it over, Driftwood falls back to the old way and tells you.
Playlists
Keeps going after you quit.
Build a playlist, decide how long each wallpaper holds, and let it run. You can quit Driftwood afterwards and your wallpapers will carry on changing without it.
- Quit the app and your wallpapers keep rotating.
- Shuffle picks a fresh order every time it comes back around.
- Every screen remembers where it was, even after a restart.
- Pause a screen and its playlist waits with it.
Evening drift
Shuffling
2D CloudsAnimated scene15 min
Harbour at duskVideo10 min
Rain on glassVideo20 min
Slow tideVideo15 min
Playing on Studio Display · Built-in screen paused on battery
Measured in the real app
Leaves room for everything else.
A 4K, roughly 60 fps HEVC wallpaper used about one percent of one CPU and 50 MB of memory in a live 30-second sample. Driftwood was running at Auto quality through the native wallpaper extension.
Benchmark details
Driftwood 1.3.0 on a 16-core M3 Max MacBook Pro with 48 GB memory, running macOS 26.5.2 on AC power. Figures are 30 one-second samples of the wallpaper extension after the first sample was discarded: 1.03% mean CPU, 0.2% median, 5.0% peak, and 49.4 MB mean memory. Another Metal wallpaper was assigned to an occluded display and automatically paused. Results will vary by Mac, display, and wallpaper.
- Average CPU
- 1%0.2% median · 5% peak
- Renderer memory
- 50MB49.4 MB sample mean
Animated scenes
Wallpapers that are code, not video.
Besides video, Driftwood plays scenes: tiny files that draw themselves fresh every frame. They never loop, they barely take up any space, and they look sharp on any screen.
float4 driftwoodMain(
float2 fragCoord,
constant DriftwoodMetalUniforms &uniforms
) {
float2 uv = fragCoord / uniforms.resolution;
float pulse = 0.5 + 0.5 * sin(uniforms.time);
return float4(uv.x, uv.y, pulse, 1.0);
}If you write shaders, you can make your own. If you don’t, a scene behaves like any other wallpaper: drop it in and pick it.
How to make oneYou are looking at the bundled 2D Clouds scene right now.
Yours, not ours
There is no catalog. That is the point.
No store to browse, no account to make, nothing locked behind a subscription. You bring wallpapers you already have, and they stay on your Mac.
Put something alive behind your icons.
Free, open source, and small. Takes about a minute to set up.
macOS 26 or later · Checked by Apple · Not on the Mac App Store
Questions
The honest answers.
Driftwood does something macOS does not officially support, so a couple of these come with a catch.
Does it replace my real wallpaper?
It takes over while it is running, and it keeps a copy of your original wallpaper settings so it can put them back. You can also turn that off and leave your system wallpaper exactly where it is.
Why does it need macOS 26 or later?
It uses a part of macOS that only exists in macOS 26 and later. On older versions there is no way for an app to become the wallpaper.
Why isn't it on the Mac App Store?
It leans on a part of macOS that Apple has not published, and the App Store does not allow that. Downloads come straight from GitHub and are checked by Apple first.
What if it cannot take over the wallpaper?
Driftwood animates over your desktop instead, and tells you it did, with a link to your Wallpaper settings so you can pick it by hand.
Will it drain my battery?
Only if you want it to. You can have it pause the moment you unplug, whenever an app is fullscreen, or when your Mac is already busy.
Where do my files go?
They stay on your Mac. Driftwood checks GitHub for app updates, but it never uploads your wallpaper files and there is no account to make.