Windows 11 may not support animated wallpapers out of the box, but you can liven up your desktop thanks to a third-party app.
Windows 11 gives you plenty of customization options to make the operating system, and thus your laptop, feel more like your own. But sometimes those options aren’t enough. For example, Windows 11 doesn’t natively support animated wallpapers, only static images (though you can cycle through different images if you want to). But that doesn’t mean you can’t use animated wallpapers. You just have to use a third-party app.
There are a few third-party apps available if you want to use animated wallpapers to liven up your Windows 11 desktop. The most popular is arguably Lively Wallpaper, which is available on the Microsoft Store. Another solid option is DeskScapes 11, though that one is paid and, frankly, not as impressive. We’ll be focusing on Lively Wallpaper here because it’s the best option.
What is Lively Wallpaper?
Lively Wallpaper is easily one of the coolest apps you can find if you want unique animated wallpapers for your PC. It’s free and open-source, with listings on the Microsoft Store and on GitHub for anybody who wants to make contributions. It provides a few wallpapers out of the box, along with the ability to customize them in different ways. These are unique wallpapers that respond to interactions with the mouse or system information, and they’re honestly very cool.
How to choose and customize a live wallpaper
First off, you might want to just choose one of the default wallpapers and customize it to suit your taste even better. Here’s how to do that:
- Download and install Lively Wallpaper from the Microsoft Store.
- Open the app, and you’ll be greeted with the home screen featuring a few (12, at writing time) wallpapers to choose from.
- Click any of the options to immediately set it as your desktop background.
- To customize the look of your wallpaper, click the ellipsis button next to its name, then choose Customise wallpaper.
- Since the available wallpapers are pretty different, the options you get also vary. These can include colors, the size of certain elements, and more. You can see changes in real-time as you make them (assuming the wallpaper is currently active).
- Click OK to save your changes.
Once you’ve saved your settings, you can close the app using the X button in the top right corner, which will minimize to the system tray. Closing it completely will make your wallpaper disappear. The app is also set to start with the system, so your animated background is always visible, though you can change this in the app’s settings.
The app also has a Gallery tab in the main view, which will presumably be used to house user-created wallpapers in the future. For now, you’re stuck with a few curated ones, but they’re all great.
How to choose your own wallpaper
While you don’t have an endless supply of wallpapers to choose from, Lively Wallpaper does let you upload your own. All kinds of wallpapers are supported, including video (online or local), GIFs, and even interactive web-based wallpapers. While we won’t dive into how you can create these wallpapers, the developer offers documentation on what’s supported. If you already have a wallpaper, here’s how to set it.
- Open the Lively Wallpaper app.
- Click the + (plus) icon in the menu bar at the top.
- Choose a file or source to use as a wallpaper
- To use a local file, drag and drop the file into the area indicated on the screen, or click Open to browse for a file. Most video file types are supported.
- To use an online video or a webpage, use the Enter URL option. The app uses a custom handler for things like YouTube videos, so you can have a video playing in the background as long as it’s not restricted from being embedded.
- The Advanced option lets you create dynamic wallpaper based on a 2D image. It uses AI to determine depth and generate a parallax effect when you move your mouse, though it can be imperfect at times.
- You can still customize some of these wallpapers just as you can with the default ones. Local video offers settings like contrast, brightness, and playback speed, while AI-generated dynamic wallpapers let you adjust how much an image should shift with the parallax effect.
- Close the app when you’re done, and the video or animated wallpaper will remain visible. If the video has audio, it will usually be muted whenever you have another app in focus.
How to apply wallpapers to multiple monitors
If you only have one monitor for your PC, things are probably pretty straightforward so far, but if you want to use these animated wallpapers with multiple screens, you may want to mess around with extra options to make it work on all your displays.
You can do this by clicking the monitor icon on the menu bar, labeled with X Active Wallpapers (X being the number of monitors with an active wallpaper from the app). From here, you can choose one of three options:
- Selected screen only (default): Applies the wallpaper only to the selected screen.
- Span across screens: Extends the wallpaper across your monitors.
- Duplicate same wallpaper: Repeats the same wallpaper on each monitor.
Some wallpapers may work well when spanned, while others will look better if you choose the duplicate option. You can play around with this depending on the wallpaper you have. If you’d like the option to always choose a monitor before applying a wallpaper, check the box that reads Always pick screen when choosing wallpaper. Click OK when you’re done with your changes here.
How to set a screensaver with Lively Wallpaper
In addition to acting as a desktop background, you can set Lively Wallpaper as a fullscreen screen saver, making it so that your current active wallpaper takes over the entire screen when the computer is idle. This requires a bit of setup, however.
- Download this ZIP file containing the screensaver.
- Extract the file called Lively from inside the .zip file and copy it into your C:Windows folder. You’ll need administrator permissions for this.
- Double-click the screen saver file to install it.
If you see a Microsoft Defender SmartScreen warning, click More info and then choose Run anyway.
- Open the Start menu and search for Change Screen Saver. It should be the first search result.
- Click the dropdown menu under Screen saver, and choose Lively.
The screensaver will be whatever you have chosen as your current wallpaper set in Lively Wallpaper. However, this should change in the future, and there is already a space for screensaver settings in the app. You can find it by following these steps:
- Open the Lively Wallpaper app.
- Click the X Active Wallpapers button mentioned above.
- Switch to the Screensaver tab.
Again, there isn’t much you can do here at writing time, but that should change in the future.
Ensure Lively Wallpaper is always running, and tips to save power
If you want your animated wallpaper to always be visible, Lively Wallpaper needs to always be running in the background. By default, Lively Wallpaper will set itself to start with Windows, so it activates your wallpaper as soon as your computer starts. If you want to make sure it’s working, though, follow these steps:
- Open Lively Wallpaper.
- Click the gear icon (Settings) in the top right corner.
- Make sure the Start with Windows option is set to On.
Something you might also want to do is take some measures to save power, especially if you have a laptop. By default, Lively Wallpaper will pause the wallpaper animations whenever a fullscreen app is open, but you can further customize these options by going into the app’s settings and checking the Performance tab. The options here include:
- Applications fullscreen: Decide what happens with animated wallpapers when an app is opened in fullscreen (default: Pause).
- Applications focused: Decide what happens when another app is in focus (default: Nothing).
- When on battery power: Decide what happens when a laptop isn’t connected to a charger (default: Nothing).
- When on battery Saver: Decide what happens when Battery Saver is enabled in the Windows settings (default: Nothing).
- When on Remote Desktop: Decide what happens when the computer is being accessed via a Remote Desktop session (default: Pause).
- Display pause rule: Decide whether pause rules should apply to all screens or on a per-screen basis (default: Per screen).
- Pause algorithm: Choose how the app should determine if another app is active. The default is Foreground process, and we recommend leaving this untouched. There’s also a Direct3D option that only pauses the wallpaper when a Direct3D app is running in exclusive fullscreen mode and disables all other performance settings.
You can use all these settings to adjust how Lively Wallpaper should behave to reduce resource usage and save power. Setting more options to Pause will save you more power, but it can reduce how lively these wallpapers feel in certain circumstances.
Make your monitor pop
And that covers the basics of using Lively Wallpaper to get an animated wallpaper on Windows 11. This is certainly one of the best apps you can get for this kind of customization, and what makes it even better is that it’s free (though there is a Patreon donation button if you want to help with development). More options keep being added over time, too. For example, the depth-based wallpapers and some of the default options weren’t available when I first tried the app but showed up by the time I wrote this guide. You can count on more features being added over time.
Again, there are other options like DeskScapes 11 by Stardock, but it’s hard to recommend anything other than Lively Wallpaper.