Set Mac Desktop Background Wallpaper from any Image in Safari

Jun 16, 2011 - 12 Comments

Set Mac wallpaper from Safari

You can set any image on the web as your Mac desktop background wallpaper directly from Safari. This means you don’t even need to download the picture to your computer to set it as the desktop background, you can just find a picture on the web and immediately use it as the wallpaper on the Mac.

The next time you’re browsing the web and you find a nice picture you’d like to use as your Mac desktop background wallpaper, just use this quick little Safari trick.

How to Set Any Picture from the Web as Mac Wallpaper from Safari

This is a really easy trick, all you need to to set a wallpaper directly from Safari is the following:

  1. In Safari, navigate to an image you wish to use as the wallpaper on the Mac (lots of great wallpaper options here)
  2. Right-click (or two-finger click with a trackpad) on the image you want to set as the wallpaper and select “Use Image as Desktop Picture”
  3. Wait a minute or two and the wallpaper image will set on the Mac to the picture you chose in Safari

set Mac  OS X desktop background wallpaper picture from Safari

That’s it! The default setting appears to be ‘Fill Screen’ so if you select an image smaller than your screen resolution it might not look that great, thus aim for high resolution wallpapers like the ones we feature.

In terms of web browsers, this feature seems to be limited only to Safari, as Chrome and Firefox don’t include the option. However, if you want to set an image from another browser as your background, save it to the computer, and then you can also right-click on any image within the Finder and set your background image there too. Or with another web browser, you could save the image to your Mac, then set it as the wallpaper within the Mac System Preferences or Finder too.

This feature has been around in Safari fror macOS and Mac OS X for quite a while, so whether you’re on Monterey, Big Sur, Mojave, Catalina, Sierra, EL Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Tiger, or earlier, you should have this capability directly in Safari.

And for those wondering, the wallpaper is Andromeda Galaxy from Lion as well, which looks quite nice on any Mac.

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Posted by: William Pearson in Customize, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

12 Comments

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  1. […] you ever set a desktop wallpaper from Safari, only to wish you had saved the file directly so you could access it later or do something else […]

  2. […] put a similar shadow on it with Photoshop. The result is this 2000×1080 PNG file, ready to be set as your desktop […]

  3. NicholasA says:

    Are you kidding me? This is news? This should’ve been a feature ten years ago

  4. xf says:

    I don’t see it in Chrome but it is definitely in Firefox. Maybe you need to upgrade.

    :)

  5. Swaroop M S says:

    This is a very useful feature which makes it easy for us to set desktop backgrounds. It is also available in Firefox 4 and the menu names it as “Set As Desktop Background…”

  6. Trench says:

    Works in Firefox and Chrome too. Didn’t test in Opera.

  7. hawk says:

    this is not new to Lion

  8. […] image on the web and you are using the Safari browser, you can just right-click on that picture to “Use as Desktop Picture” – this is the easiest for pictures on the […]

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