How to Change Your Screensaver on macOS

· Scanner Techs

Changing your screensaver takes about thirty seconds once you know where Apple has put the setting, which has moved more than once. Here is the whole thing, including the parts that are not in the Screen Saver pane at all, and what to do when a screensaver you installed refuses to appear.

Open the Screen Saver settings

On macOS 13 Ventura and later:

  1. Open the Apple menu and choose System Settings.
  2. In the sidebar, scroll down to Screen Saver.

On macOS 12 Monterey and earlier it is System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver, in the Screen Saver tab. Same idea, different furniture.

If you cannot find the row in the sidebar, type “screen saver” into the search box at the top of the System Settings window and it will take you there.

Pick one

The pane is a gallery of thumbnails. Click one and it previews in the panel at the top. Nothing is saved or confirmed, the click is the change, and you can click through ten of them in a row to compare.

Two things are easy to miss:

  • Options. Some screensavers have settings behind an Options button, which only appears once that saver is selected. The photo slideshows let you choose an album and a transition, and Message lets you type your own text.
  • The categories. Recent macOS versions group the aerial videos by subject at the top of the gallery, and a Show All button expands each group. The older savers, such as Drift, Shell, Hello and the photo slideshows, sit further down. Anything from outside Apple is grouped under Others, and if you cannot see that group, press Show All.

Apple also lets a video screensaver carry on into your desktop wallpaper when you come back to the Mac, with a tick box in the same pane. It looks good and it does use power, so turn it off on a laptop you want to get a full day out of.

Where third-party screensavers live

Anything you install yourself appears lower down the gallery, below Apple’s own sets, usually in a group called Other. If you have several, that group is where you will find all of them.

Scroll to the bottom of the gallery before deciding one is missing. The third-party group is below the point where most people stop scrolling.

Make it start sooner, or later

The timer is not in the Screen Saver pane. It lives in System Settings → Lock Screen, which also holds the related settings:

  • Start Screen Saver when inactive. Pick anything from one minute to never.
  • Turn display off on battery and on power. Set these longer than the screensaver timer, or the display sleeps before the screensaver gets a turn, which is the usual reason a new screensaver never seems to run.
  • Require password after screen saver begins or display is turned off. This is the lock setting. Immediately is the safe choice on a laptop. A short delay is kinder on a Mac at home.

Start it on demand with a hot corner

A hot corner starts the screensaver the moment you push the pointer into a corner of the screen. It is the quickest way to test a new one, and it is handy for covering your screen before someone walks over.

  1. Go to System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
  2. Scroll to the bottom and click Hot Corners.
  3. Open the menu for the corner you want and choose Start Screen Saver.
  4. Click Done.

One tip: hold a modifier key, such as Command or Option, while choosing the action. The corner then only fires when you hold that key, which stops the screensaver appearing every time you reach for the menu bar or the Dock.

Top-left and bottom-left are the usual picks, because the right-hand corners are near other things people reach for.

Why a screensaver you installed is not in the list

This is the common one, and there are only a few causes.

It is in the wrong folder. Screensavers live in one of two places: ~/Library/Screen Savers for your account only, and /Library/Screen Savers for everyone on the Mac. If the file ended up anywhere else, including Downloads, it will not show up. In Finder, press Shift-Command-G, paste ~/Library/Screen Savers, and put the .saver file in there.

System Settings was open when you installed it. The gallery builds its list once. Quit System Settings with Command-Q, open it again, and look at the bottom of the gallery.

Gatekeeper is holding it. A screensaver downloaded in a browser is checked before macOS will run it. If it is signed but not notarised by Apple, you often get no clear message: it either never appears in the gallery, or a warning shows up the first time it tries to run. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and the blocked item will be there with an Open Anyway button next to it. One click, once.

It is too old. Screensavers are small plug-ins, and plug-ins can break when the system around them changes. If a saver has not been touched in years and does nothing when selected, that is usually the reason, and only its author can fix it.

Still nothing? Log out and back in. That rebuilds the list properly, and it is faster than a restart.

A note on Nap

Nap is our screensaver app for macOS 13 and later, and it is paid, with a two-day free trial that starts the first time you open it. It puts its screensavers into the right folder for you and gives each of them a live preview, so you adjust the speed or the size and watch the result instead of hunting through System Settings.

If you install it with the one-line Terminal command there is no Gatekeeper warning to click through at all. Then it is the usual steps above: System Settings, Screen Saver, scroll to the bottom.

Once you are in there, the Flip Clock screensaver is the one most people try first, closely followed by the football fired from a slingshot. You can set them all to the same style and background so they match.

All posts · Nap is our own collection of screensavers for the Mac. Install it and the first two days are free.