How to Use Animated GIF Images and Videos as Backgrounds For Mac?

The word GIF stands for graphics interchange format; it contains a number of frames or images in a particular file and is portrayed by its own graphics control extension.

The frames and images are set in a specific order that intends to convey animation. An animated GIF can be looping incessantly or can be stopped after some sequences.

Animated GIF is an addition of the GIF standard that works to permit the animated images to be created by some cramming frames’ set into a particular file for playback in sequences.

I suppose that you may have seen the web pages while using most of the websites decorated with video backgrounds but did you know that it can also be possible to start using animated GIF images and videos as wallpapers on your Mac desktop.

Natively, the static wallpaper images are supported by OS X, but there’s some Mac utility known as GIFPaper that adds support for any of the live animated backgrounds to your desktop.

Go through the guidelines given below to know how To Use Animated GIF Images and Videos as Backgrounds for Mac:

1.     First of all, you should have a GIF image. (You can download it using Giphy for readymade GIFs, or you can create your own cinemagraphs using Photoshop. And if you are trying to set a video as your background on the Mac, we recommend you to use convert to GIF using FFmpeg).

2.     Then you will need to download the GIFPaper app from Dropbox and take out the content to a local folder.

3.     Tap twice on the GIFPaperPrefs file that you will find inside the extracted folder to install the preferences pane.

4.     Open the System Preferences of your Mac and tap twice on the GIPPaperFref. Doing so will launch the actual app.

5.     Now, you need to browse your Mac, locate the GIF and set the Scaling to Axes Independently. Doing so will set the GIF as the background of your Mac desktop.

Note: If you use multiple virtual desktops, then only the current screen is likely to be changed. To preserve your wallpaper preferences, GIFPaperAgent can be placed or added to your Mac login items. Also, it might not be a good idea to start using the animated GIFs on older Mac desktops because it tends to consume many system resources.

Thank you for reading this article. We hope that this is going to help you set some fascinating wallpapers and make your Mac desktop look more attractive than before.

“Bradon Wilson is a self-professed security expert; he has been making the people aware of the security threats. His passion is to write about Cyber security, cryptography, malware, social engineering, internet and new media. He writes for Norton security products at norton.com/setup.”