‘Wallpapers’ Version 2 is Here | Shortcuts Workflow

I’m someone who loves to change the wallpapers on my device. The truth of smartphones and tablets is that only so many physical designs exists, so you have to take the opportunities you can to make yours really feel like its yours. Over the course of the last year or so, we saw a huge customization trend on iOS. Part of this was fueled by the addition of Home Screen widgets, while another part was born of the ability to give apps “custom icons” via the Shortcuts app. Personally, I never felt the need to take customization of my device that level (though I did play around with it a bit while I was on Android). What I am well-known for, though, is changing my wallpapers.

Setting wallpapers the old fashioned way.

Setting wallpapers on iOS isn’t incredibly difficult: just find the image that you want to set as a wallpaper in your photos app, tap Use as Wallpaper, set your positioning and location and you’re good to go! But what if I don’t want my Photos app cluttered up with the wallpapers that I’ve chosen to hoard away like some kind of wallpaper gremlin? Apple doesn’t really have a solution for you, outside of save the photo in question to the photos app. That’s no way to live.

And that’s where my Wallpapers shortcut comes into play.

Wallpapers Key Features

There’s a few key actions that makes Wallpapers tick. The first is Get Contents of Folder. With this action, you can point Shortcuts at any folder you want, locally or in the cloud, and get all of the items contained with in. Paired with the Choose From List action, you use this to make your own file picker. The final action that brings it all together is Set Wallpaper. Passing an image to this action allows you to set it as your Lock Screen or Home Screen without having to save the image to your photo library first.

Maybe you’re not in the mood to pick out a wallpaper, despite the fact that your current one has got to go. Wallpapers has you covered there too! Taking that same Get Contents of Folder action and pairing it with a Get Item From List means that you can have the shortcut pick a random image from your given folder! The only choice you have to make is do you want the image on your Home Screen or Lock Screen.

You can choose a wallpaper or let the shortcut decide.

Of course I know that you might want to change the images on both your Home Screen and Lock Screen, but to unique images. I’ve got your back there, too! Once your wallpaper is set, the shortcut simply asks if you want to get another wallpaper or not? Choosing yes runs the shortcut again, while no will end it.

Finally, I’m happy to share that Wallpapers is compatibility with not only your iPhone and iPad, but your Mac as well. That’s right, using certain logic (that really shouldn’t be needed), Wallpapers can tell if its being run on a device that supports lock screens or not. Run it on your Mac and all you have to do is choose a wallpaper or get a random one — no looping here! Personally, I like keeping this shortcut pinned to my menu bar so I can quickly change my desktop wallpaper whenever I want.

Setting Up Wallpapers

Setting up Wallpapers is incredibly easy with only two onboarding questions: Where do you store your desktop wallpapers? and Where do you store you mobile wallpapers? Setting these two variables will make sure whatever fork in the shortcut you’re running, you’ll get the right wallpapers every time. After all, no one wants to see an iPhone wallpaper on their Mac’s desktop, do they?

Setup is as simple as selecting your wallpaper folders!

The best tip that I can give you for this part is to store your wallpapers in the cloud. While storing your wallpapers locally should be feasible (though completely untested), this particular workflow is built around having one cloud-based bucket for all of your wallpapers. In the future, I may experiment with a local option as well, though that isn’t something I plan to do any time in the near future.

Some Notes on Wallpapers

I’m really excited to finally have gotten this built, more or less, the way I wanted. I had previously built a much more rudimentary version of this shortcut that I shared with my fellow members of the Club MacStories Discord server and it got the job done just well enough. When I built that, I was at a point where I was just starting to get interested in building more complex shortcuts, so while most of the utility was there, the user-friendliness wasn’t. The worst part for me was that number of times you’d have to set your desktop and mobile wallpapers folders because I just wasn’t approaching the folder variable from the right angle.

This is the best option I had for looping the shortcut.

Building this still wasn’t easy — I ran into various issues between all of my devices where I couldn’t get the shortcut to run again consistently. It’s possible this was an iOS issue (I thought updating my iPad to 15.1.1 fixed that) but then the issue cropped up again. I started from scratch, again, and built what seems to be the most stable and user-friendly version of this shortcut to date. I haven’t seen that issue crop up in this particular build so I believe whatever issue was there has been worked out. If you do run into an error where the shortcut can’t run itself again, all I can say is try again and hope for the best.

Download Wallpapers

If reading this has made you decide you’d like to give my shortcut Wallpapers a try, you can download it with the iCloud link here. If you do decide to use this shortcut in your day-to-day life, I’d love to hear from you on Twitter or down in the comments below!

What’s your favorite Shortcut that you’ve built on your Mac or iOS device? Let’s talk about it down in the comments!