If you've ever been involved in the world of Windows customization, chances are, you've heard of live wallpaper applications like Wallpaper Engine. It's a paid application that you can install on Windows to get live, animated wallpapers that show on your desktop. It's a pretty cheap program with a lot of wallpapers on offer, but what if I told you that there's a free, open-source alternative that manages to achieve a lot of the same things that Wallpaper Engine does? It's called Lively Wallpaper.

For most people, Lively Wallpaper might just be good enough to manage your wallpapers, and you might not need the large repository of options available in Wallpaper Engine's library. There are tons of wallpapers for Lively on sites like Reddit, created by other users and easy to install, and it even comes with a few, too.

What is Lively Wallpaper?

It's a feature-rich live wallpaper application

Lively Wallpaper is a completely free and open-source application that can be used to set dynamic, interactive, and animated wallpapers on Windows. You can set animated wallpapers of all kinds as your desktop, including GIFs, videos, and more. Plus, it supports WebGL, meaning you can create dynamic web apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can serve as animated wallpapers on your desktop.

It has a ton of additional features as well, including the ability to pause while you're gaming, to speed up to slow down depending on what you're doing and to disable when you're connected via remote desktop if you might be on a slower connection. It also had taskbar customization options built in a while ago, though that proved to be buggy and its development is currently on hold.

As for how it detects when you're gaming, it will simply pause the wallpaper's animation either when a full-screen application is detected, or when an application that's in a user-defined list of applications is launched. There are so many wallpapers out there that you can get and use, and it's an incredibly simple and easy tool to use. It even supports multiple monitors, including portrait monitors.

Plenty of wallpapers will have customization options too, including the ability to cap their FPS, change their movement speeds, or modify how objects interact on the screen. Most of the wallpapers that come with Lively have customization options, but there are plenty of community-made wallpapers that have options, too.

We recommend diving in with Lively to see what's available and find out if anything catches your eye. If it does, you can then try and customize the wallpaper to your liking. If you really want to get into the weeds with things, you can right-click a wallpaper, click Open file location, and modify the files yourself to slow down, speed up, or otherwise change the wallpaper that you're using.

This is especially possible for the wallpapers that are rendered using WebGL, as these will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to render what's on the screen. There should be variables that you can modify easily, which should instantly have an effect on how the wallpaper is rendered.

Where can you get wallpapers for Lively?

They're all free

If you want to get wallpapers for Lively, your best port of call is the LivelyWallpaper subreddit. There, users can submit their own wallpapers, and many do so with download links so that you can use them yourself. There's also an official Lively Deviantart group, where you can download wallpapers and drag and drop them into Lively for immediate use.

While Wallpaper Engine is a larger project with significantly more support behind it, I actually enjoy using Lively a lot more. Wallpaper Engine can feel clunky when used at times, whereas Lively feels like a native Windows application through and through. This is because Lively uses WinUI 3 to draw its UI elements, while Wallpaper Engine uses a custom UI. It's certainly functional, but Lively is instantly more welcoming to use thanks to that.

Simply going on GitHub and searching "Lively Wallpaper" yields quite a few results for wallpapers that you can install, and Lively even comes with a few, too. Some of them aren't particularly eye-catching though, so you may want to go digging for your own ones to truly make your PC your own. It's a great, free way to customize your PC though, and worth giving a shot, especially given that it's free.

How to get the most out of Lively Wallpaper

These are the settings you need to look out for

If you want to get the most out of Lively Wallpaper, especially when it comes to performance, you should head on over to the settings and go to the Performance tab. As we've already mentioned, these settings will already respond to things like full-screen applications and, but there's more to tweak, too. These include:

• Applications fullscreen: Decide what happens with animated wallpapers when an app is opened in fullscreen (default: Pause).
• Applications focused: Decide what happens when another app is in focus (default: Nothing).
• When on battery power: Decide what happens when a laptop isn't connected to a charger (default: Nothing).
• When on battery Saver: Decide what happens when Battery Saver is enabled in the Windows settings (default: Nothing).
• When on Remote Desktop: Decide what happens when the computer is being accessed via a Remote Desktop session (default: Pause).
• Display pause rule: Decide whether pause rules should apply to all screens or on a per-screen basis (default: Per screen).
• Pause algorithm: Choose how the app should determine if another app is active. The default is Foreground process, and we recommend leaving this untouched. There's also a Direct3D option that only pauses the wallpaper when a Direct3D app is running in exclusive fullscreen mode and disables all other performance settings.

You can use all these settings to adjust how Lively Wallpaper should behave to reduce resource usage and save power. Setting more options to Pause will save you more power, but it can reduce how frequently these wallpapers are visibly enabled.