I nonetheless use a PC wallpaper app in 2025 and I am not ashamed of it
After I first discovered Photoshop within the early 2000s, I spent plenty of time making desktop wallpapers. I performed with filters and customized brushes, Matrix fonts, and inverted colours. You may most likely nonetheless discover my previous “portfolio” of them on-line someplace. I don’t have time for that anymore, however I do nonetheless use a PC wallpaper app. Bizarre, proper?
Right here’s the factor: I don’t need fancy or superior wallpapers. I don’t need them to be “dynamic” or “stay,” I don’t need video games tucked within the nook, and I don’t need stay information or inventory ticker particulars. (As you’ll be able to inform, I’m not a fan of Home windows widgets and notifications, both.)
I simply need my wallpapers to be easy but assorted. I need my Home windows background to be recent whereas my desktop icons stay legible. However as a result of the built-in Home windows Highlight characteristic doesn’t provide a lot customization, I choose to make use of the Dynamic Theme app as a substitute—and in my humble opinion, it trumps all of the premium options.
Why Dynamic Theme beats Highlight
Dynamic Theme is a freely accessible dynamic background software accessible within the Microsoft Retailer (relaxation assured it really works nicely with all current variations of Home windows) that augments the already-pretty-good Home windows Highlight. It’s been round because the Home windows 10 days, so I’m not breaking new floor right here, nevertheless it actually is a diamond within the tough. It does the whole lot I would like a wallpaper app to do and extra, plus it doesn’t price a factor.
To be honest, I really like how Home windows Highlight offers you a brand new wallpaper on daily basis, and my curiosities are happy by the very fact I can click on on somewhat info-bubble and get extra details about the panorama, constructing, or vista within the day’s picture. However Home windows Highlight is restricted to 1080p and you may’t customise it past turning it on and off.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
Dynamic Theme takes all of the issues I like about Home windows Highlight and provides within the customization that’s lacking.
With an interface and theme that appears like a local Home windows app, Dynamic Theme feels acquainted and has a near-zero studying curve. But it offers you the flexibility to customise how your dynamically altered wallpapers change, together with what they alter to.
You may select between Home windows Highlight or Bing as sources on your background footage (the latter of which could be increased resolutions), and you may select which picture is displayed, too, with the flexibility to cycle by way of all current choices and decide the one you want the very best.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
You may have a unique picture on your desktop background versus your lock display, select how the background matches to your display (helpful you probably have a monitor with a distinct segment side ratio), and tweak the conduct of how the background picture really modifications.
You may have the modifications occur dynamically, ship you a notification when a brand new one is out there, or have it set off at a sure time of day. You may even have the images mechanically saved offline so you’ll be able to return to them later or use them for one thing else solely.
Ditching the advertisements and the monitoring
One of the vital lip-curlingly distasteful features of Home windows Highlight is that, alongside these beautiful vistas and click-through insights into what or the place I’m taking a look at, Microsoft additionally inserts advertisements for varied apps and providers into them. The little pop-up bubbles aren’t tremendous distracting, however they’re undoubtedly there—they usually take away from the great thing about the backdrop and really feel intrusive in an exploitative manner.
Dynamic Theme does away with all of that. Because it isn’t utilizing Highlight to alter the wallpaper or lock display background—simply grabbing the pictures and altering it itself—there aren’t any advertisements to be seen.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
Nevertheless, Dynamic Theme does have one distasteful setting of its personal. Fortuitously, it’s a toggle and completely non-compulsory.
When you’ve downloaded the app and set it up as you want, ensure that to navigate to the Info tab within the left-hand menu. Alongside another helpful choices—like setting the app’s theme and having fast entry to a suggestions type—is the heading Diagnostic and utilization knowledge.
That is the information assortment portion of the app that may gather utilization and diagnostic info on you and your machine. Ostensibly, it’s to assist repair issues once they happen in addition to enhance the app’s general service. But when the app is free, you’re the product. And if that bothers you, it’s nice to see that there’s a toggle to Disable this knowledge monitoring.
Easy, easy, and stylish
The trendy world of computing, from the web we browse to the apps we use to the {hardware} that runs all of it, so usually feels bloated, oversold, and aggressively difficult. For that cause, it’s at all times a deal with to search out an utility that’s so definitively easy.
Dynamic Theme offers you the form of management that Home windows Highlight ought to have, whereas ditching the worst features of it. It has a clear, easy UI that matches in along with your Home windows theme of selection and doesn’t take any time to study to navigate.
It allows you to prioritize backgrounds that suit your shows and resolutions, leaning into beautiful views of our world with out messing round with resource-draining dynamic or stay backgrounds that are extra distracting than anything.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
Dynamic Theme is unashamably old-school in its method, and it’s precisely the form of straight-thinking take that I need in one thing as basic to the Home windows expertise as a beautiful, helpful wallpaper that makes positive I can see my icons however stays recent and dynamic.
It modifications when I need, how I need, and in a fashion that doesn’t overstep its bounds. There’s no paid premium model and no advertisements. Simply beautiful footage for my background and lock display. I don’t must scroll by way of a wallpaper web site, discover the suitable decision or side ratio, or have my GPU working arduous simply to show the backdrop.
Generally the very best instruments aren’t the most recent and biggest. They’re those that proceed doing the identical nice job they’ve at all times completed. Dynamic Theme is considered one of them. Lengthy might it proceed.
Additional studying: Helpful hidden gem Home windows apps value utilizing
