When I first realized Photoshop within the early 2000s, I spent quite a lot of time making desktop wallpapers. I performed with filters and customized brushes, Matrix fonts, and inverted colours. You can in all probability nonetheless discover my outdated “portfolio” of them on-line someplace. I don’t have time for that anymore, however I do nonetheless use a PC wallpaper app. Weird, proper?
Here’s the factor: I don’t need fancy or superior wallpapers. I don’t need them to be “dynamic” or “live,” I don’t need video games tucked within the nook, and I don’t need dwell information or inventory ticker particulars. (As you possibly can inform, I’m not a fan of Windows widgets and notifications, both.)
I simply need my wallpapers to be easy but various. I need my Windows background to be contemporary whereas my desktop icons stay legible. But as a result of the built-in Windows Spotlight characteristic doesn’t supply a lot customization, I favor 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 Spotlight
Dynamic Theme is a freely obtainable dynamic background device obtainable in the Microsoft Store (relaxation assured it really works nicely with all latest variations of Windows) that augments the already-pretty-good Windows Spotlight. It’s been round because the Windows 10 days, so I’m not breaking new floor right here, however it actually is a diamond within the tough. It does every part I would like a wallpaper app to do and extra, plus it doesn’t price a factor.
To be truthful, I really like how Windows Spotlight provides you a brand new wallpaper each day, and my curiosities are happy by the very fact I can click on on a bit info-bubble and get extra details about the panorama, constructing, or vista within the day’s picture. But Windows Spotlight is proscribed 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 Windows Spotlight and provides within the customization that’s lacking.
With an interface and theme that appears like a local Windows app, Dynamic Theme feels acquainted and has a near-zero studying curve. Yet it provides you the power to customise how your dynamically altered wallpapers change, together with what they modify to.
You can select between Windows Spotlight or Bing as sources in your background footage (the latter of which will be greater resolutions), and you may select which picture is displayed, too, with the power to cycle by way of all latest choices and decide the one you want the very best.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
You can have a distinct picture in your desktop background versus your lock display screen, select how the background suits to your display screen (helpful in case you have a monitor with a niche aspect ratio), and tweak the habits of how the background picture really modifications.
You can have the modifications occur dynamically, ship you a notification when a brand new one is offered, or have it set off at a sure time of day. You may even have the images robotically saved offline so you possibly can return to them later or use them for one thing else totally.
Ditching the advertisements and the monitoring
One of essentially the most lip-curlingly distasteful points of Windows Spotlight is that, alongside these beautiful vistas and click-through insights into what or the place I’m , Microsoft additionally inserts advertisements for varied apps and companies into them. The little pop-up bubbles aren’t tremendous distracting, however they’re positively there—and so they take away from the great thing about the backdrop and really feel intrusive in an exploitative method.
Dynamic Theme does away with all of that. Since it isn’t utilizing Spotlight to vary the wallpaper or lock display screen background—simply grabbing the pictures and altering it itself—there aren’t any advertisements to be seen.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
However, Dynamic Theme does have one distasteful setting of its personal. Fortunately, it’s a toggle and completely elective.
Once you’ve downloaded the app and set it up as you want, make sure that to navigate to the Information 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 information.
This 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 after they happen in addition to enhance the app’s total service. But if 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 information monitoring.
Straightforward, easy, and elegant
The trendy world of computing, from the web we browse to the apps we use to the {hardware} that runs all of it, so typically feels bloated, oversold, and aggressively difficult. For that purpose, it’s all the time a deal with to seek out an utility that’s so definitively easy.
Dynamic Theme provides you the form of management that Windows Spotlight ought to have, whereas ditching the worst points of it. It has a clear, simple UI that matches in together with your 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 dwell backgrounds that are extra distracting than the rest.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
Dynamic Theme is unashamably old-school in its strategy, and it’s precisely the form of straight-thinking take that I need in one thing as basic to the Windows expertise as a lovely, helpful wallpaper that makes positive I can see my icons however stays contemporary 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. Just beautiful footage for my background and lock display screen. I don’t need to scroll by way of a wallpaper website, discover the fitting decision or facet ratio, or have my GPU working arduous simply to show the backdrop.
Sometimes the very best instruments aren’t the most recent and best. They’re those that proceed doing the identical nice job they’ve all the time finished. Dynamic Theme is one among them. Long could it proceed.
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