A menubar app that keeps your desktop fresh, from the free Pexels library.
Wallpaper Engine Lite lives in your menu bar and does one thing: keeps your
desktop looking like somewhere you would rather be. Click the icon, pick a mood,
and it pulls a fresh photograph from Pexels and sets it. No Dock icon, no
window to manage, no account.
It is free, MIT licensed, and written in plain Swift and SwiftUI with **no
third-party packages at all**.
Six categories are built in — **Nature, City, Minimal, Abstract, Space and
Architecture — and the +** button takes any keyword you like. Cyberpunk,
forest rain, brutalist concrete, anime interiors: whatever Pexels can
search for, you can make a category.
Set Random Wallpaper does exactly that, in one click. If you would rather
choose, Browse shows a scrollable grid of what is available in the current
category — click any photo to set it.
Turn on auto-change and it rotates on its own: every 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 or
120 minutes. A live countdown tells you how long until the next one, so the
timer is never a mystery.
Launch at login means you set it up once and never open it again.
There is no background polling. Nothing runs on a timer unless you asked for a
timer, which is why it barely registers in Activity Monitor.
It does not ship an API key, and it does not proxy your requests through
anything of mine. You paste your own free Pexels key into Settings, and the app
talks to Pexels directly from your machine. Getting a key takes about a minute
at pexels.com/api, and it costs nothing.
Apple Silicon only. The build is arm64, so it will not run on an Intel Mac.
That is a real limitation rather than an oversight — there is simply no
universal binary yet.
macOS 13 or later.
Unsigned. Like the other free apps here, it does not pay Apple's yearly
certificate fee, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open. macOS will ask
once and then stop asking. The source is public if you would rather build it
yourself.
You need a Pexels key. The app cannot fetch anything until you paste one in.
That is the trade for it being free and having no server of mine in the middle.