The original 4K masters
Every film is the same 4K SDR master your screen saver already uses, pulled from the source macOS points at. Skywall never re-encodes and never hosts a copy.
Live wallpaper for macOS
Live wallpaperfor your Mac.
Skywall plays the moving Aerial films already bundled with macOS as your desktop wallpaper — all 152 of them, in 4K, on every display.
Favorites
Every Aerial, already on your Mac.
Nothing to buy and nothing to import.
The ones you keep.
Mark a film and it collects here, one click away from becoming the wallpaper on every display you own.
It behaves like part of the system.
Skywall writes your choice into the same wallpaper store macOS uses and lets the system play it. No window painted over the desktop, no daemon of our own.
One sky across every screen you have. Plug a monitor in or unplug it and Skywall rebuilds itself around the new arrangement.
Playback halves under Low Power Mode and stops outright when the display sleeps, the Mac locks, the screen saver takes over or the machine runs hot.
Pause, switch the film, open the folder or quit — without opening a window. macOS 14 or later.
Introducing
A quiet wallpaper engine for your Mac.
Skywall plays the Aerial films bundled with macOS on your desktop — every display, native pipeline, and it steps aside the moment your Mac needs the power.
They land in the system folder
Downloads go straight into the Aerials folder macOS already keeps. Delete Skywall and the films stay exactly where the system expects them.
Everything you need, in one app.
It’s your screen saver too
Skywall writes your pick into the Idle slot macOS keeps for itself. The same film that drifts behind your work carries on when the Mac sits untouched.
The whole catalogue
Every Aerial film built into macOS, sorted the way the system sorts them.
152 films
It steps aside
No settings to tune — Skywall watches the Mac and backs off on its own.
Low Power ModeHalf rate
Display asleepPaused
Locked or screen saverPaused
Covered by a full-screen appPaused
Mac running hotPaused
Performance
Built the way a Mac app should be.
One small Swift binary that hands the video to macOS and then stays out of the way.
It barely takes any room
Forty-six megabytes resident while the aerials play, measured on the Mac this site was built on.
The system does the decoding
Frames go through AVFoundation to the same hardware decoder macOS uses for its own screen saver.
Swift and AppKit, nothing else
No Electron, no web view, no third-party packages. The whole binary is 797 KB.
Idle when it should be
Covered, locked, asleep or hot — playback stops. On battery saver it drops to half rate.