Modern Windows systems can be configured to cycle through pictures from a folder at regular intervals. Some operating systems, such as the Android operating system, provide native support for animated wallpapers.

Animated backgrounds Īn animated wallpaper using Wallpaper Engine on Windows 10Īnimated backgrounds (sometimes referred to as live backgrounds or dynamic backgrounds) refers to wallpapers which feature a moving image or a 2D / 3D scene as an operating system background rather than a static image, it may also refer to wallpapers being cycled in a playlist, often with certain transition effects. Bliss, the default wallpaper of Microsoft Windows XP has become the most viewed photograph of the 2000s. ĭue to the widespread use of personal computers, some wallpapers have become immensely recognizable and gained iconic cultural status. A wallpaper feature was added in a beta release of OS/2 2.0 in 1991. Although Windows 3.0 only came with 7 small patterns (2 black-and-white and 5 16-color), the user could supply other images in the BMP file format with up to 8-bit color (although the system was theoretically capable of handling 24-bit color images, it did so by dithering them to an 8-bit palette) to provide similar wallpaper features otherwise lacking in those systems. Windows 3.0 in 1990 was the first version of Microsoft Windows to come with support for wallpaper customization, and used the term 'wallpaper' for this feature. Mac OS 8 in 1997 was the first Macintosh version to include built-in support for using arbitrary images as desktop pictures, rather than small repeating patterns.

The original Macintosh operating system only allowed a selection of 8×8-pixel binary-image tiled patterns the ability to use small color patterns was added in System 5 in 1987. Subsequently, a number of programs were released that added wallpaper support for additional image formats and other features, such as the xpmroot program (released in 1993 as part of fvwm) and the xv software (released in 1994). In 1989, a free software program called xgifroot was released that allowed an arbitrary color GIF image to be used as wallpaper, and in the same year the free xloadimage program was released which could display a variety of image formats (including color images in Sun Rasterfile format) as the desktop background. The X Window System was one of the earliest systems to include support for an arbitrary image as wallpaper via the xsetroot program, which at least as early as the X10R3 release in 1985 could tile the screen with any solid color or any binary-image X BitMap file. Original computer wallpaper pattern, as used in Xerox's Officetalk and Star

Windows 10 animated backgrounds