More solid color options for OSX desktop background
Most OSX users know they can change their desktop background.But many are surprised to find that OSX ships with only 11 solid color options.
There’s a couple of shades of grey and blue, an ugly shade of green and pink, and an “invisible” white option. There’s really not much to choose from.
Even stranger, Apple chose not to include a color picker. Why they did this is beyond me.
Here’s a screenshot of the Desktop Preferences windows illustrating the available solid colors:
What this means is that if you want, for example, a solid red background, you have to go into Photoshop or some other image editor and create an image from scratch. And you’d need to do this every time you wanted to change colors. For many, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
So I decided to automate the process using a little PHP wizardry. I built a very simple tool, located here, that dynamically builds a variety of colored image swatches, simplifying the process of generating new solid colors for desktop backgrounds.
Simply visit the tool, generate some images, and then use “File -> Save Page As -> Webpage, Complete” to download the image files. Then move the image files to this directory:
~/Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors
They’ll automatically be recognized in your desktop preferences, which will now look more like this:
As a bonus, the tool I created allows you to customize the color schemes of generated images… so you can get a wide variety based on your preferences: dark colors, light colors, “websafe colors” or whatever. I also allowed for the adjustment of swatch size, in case anyone has other uses for this.
Here’s a link to a zip file of all the “websafe colors” in case someone just wants to quickly download it: websafe-color-swatches.zip
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AMAZING you are a king!
Many thanks -you saved me loads of time!
Also worth trying… activate the automatic change picture every 5 seconds random order thing at the bottom of the window.
Awesome job I have been waiting for something like this for so long. Apple gives you terrible colors to choose from. Thanks again for brightening up my image!
Btw, you need to move the pictures to /Library/Desktop Pictures/ not ~/Library/Desktop Pictures. Unless you created one, it doesn’t exist…
Anywho, that root level folder works just as well :)