Lucid

Version 1.1.1 · free for Mac

Your desktop,
wide awake.

Lucid plays moving 4K space, nature and ocean scenes behind your icons, on every display. Native, tiny, and it never phones home.

Download for Mac One-line install

Apple Silicon · macOS 14 Sonoma or later · about 2 MB · MIT licensed

Pick a scene. Click Apply.
That's the whole manual.

Lucid

A live aurora wallpaper, running on the desktop.

What's inside

Nearly six hundred skies,
every one true 4K.

  1. Live 4K catalog

    About 590 curated moving wallpapers from ESA/Webb, ESA/Hubble, ESO, NASA and Wikimedia Commons. Every clip is checked at 3840×2160 or larger and turned into a seamless loop.

    • Space
    • Nature & Landscapes
    • Ocean & Beaches
    • Sky & Time-lapse
    • Cities

  2. Apple Aerials

    Apple's own 4K aerial films. The ones already on your Mac apply instantly; the rest download from Apple when you pick them.

  3. Every display, its own scene

    A different wallpaper on each monitor, playlists, favorites, an auto-change timer and a menu-bar switcher for recent picks.

  4. Bring your own

    Drop in videos, photos or whole folders. WebM and MKV are converted to HEVC for you. Anything under 4K gets a clear flag.

  5. Easy on the battery

    Playback pauses when the desktop is covered, in Low Power Mode, on battery, when the screen locks or the display sleeps.

  6. Private by design

    No account, no analytics, no telemetry. Lucid only talks to the sources you browse.

Footage from the people who shot it

Sources: NASA, ESA/Webb, ESA/Hubble, ESO, Wikimedia Commons and Apple Aerials.

Credit and license are shown on every item. The repo ships links, not footage.

How it works

One quiet layer,
slipped under your icons.

Each display gets a borderless window at desktop level, above the system wallpaper and below the desktop icons. Inside it, a muted, hardware-decoded AVQueuePlayer loops the scene. A still frame is also set as the real desktop picture, so Mission Control and other Spaces match.

Desktop icons
Lucid · looping 4K video
macOS desktop picture · matching still

The build

My first app.
Shipped in public.

Lucid is a native macOS app written in Swift with SwiftUI, AppKit and AVFoundation. No third-party dependencies. Every push runs CI, and bumping the version publishes the release zip automatically.

Stack

  • Swift 5
  • SwiftUI + AppKit
  • AVFoundation
  • GitHub Actions CI
  • Python catalog builder + tests
  1. 1.1.1One-click download, and Apple Aerials found on macOS 26/27.
  2. 1.1.0Category and sort menus, Recently Used in the menu bar.
  3. 1.0.1Wallpapers keep playing when Lucid is hidden.
  4. 1.0.0First public release.
Lucid app icon

Wake up your desktop.

Download Lucid.zip

or paste this into Terminal

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jedbrnth-eng/lucid-live-wallpaper/main/install.sh | bash

Lucid isn't notarized by Apple yet. After a browser download, open it once via System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. The installer handles this for you.