Live wallpapers have been introduced in Android Eclair to provide native support for animated wallpapers. Windows Ultimate Extras (only offered in the Ultimate editions of Windows Vista) also includes Windows DreamScene, which allows videos of any supported format (including animated GIFs) as wallpapers. Similar functionality can be found in the Active Desktop feature of Internet Explorer versions 4 to 6, which is included in Windows 95 OSR 2.5 through Windows XP. Windows does not natively support animated backgrounds, however, third-party software can be installed to have full support for placing animated images, video files, 2D or 3D scenes, and web pages as wallpapers. Since Windows 7, modern Windows systems can be configured to cycle through pictures from a folder at regular intervals. Some operating systems, such as Android, provide native support for animated wallpapers. Animated backgrounds An 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 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 feature 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. History Original computer wallpaper pattern, as used in Xerox's Officetalk and Star On older systems which allowed small repeated patterns to be set as background images, the term desktop pattern was used. The term ' wallpaper' was used in Microsoft Windows before Windows XP (where it is called the 'desktop background'), while macOS refers to it as 'desktop picture'. Though most devices include a default background image, modern devices usually allow users to manually change the background image. On a computer, wallpapers are generally used on the desktop, while on a mobile phone they serve as the background for the home screen. Decorative background on electronic devices A computer screen showing a background wallpaper photo of the Palace of Versailles A wallpaper from fractalĪ wallpaper or background (also known as a desktop background, desktop picture or desktop image on computers) is a digital image (photo, drawing etc.) used as a decorative background of a graphical user interface on the screen of a computer, smartphone or other electronic device.

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