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Free and open source

One wallpaper across every monitor

macOS gives every monitor its own wallpaper. SpreadPaper gives them one picture, carried on over the frames instead of starting again on each screen. Keep it still, pair a light one with a dark one, or run a whole day on a schedule, on every display you have, or on just the one.

Download for macOSStar on GitHub86people have starred it

Free and open source under the MIT licence. Requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Photograph by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash, one of the photographs the app ships with.

Three kinds

Change with the day, with the light, or not at all

Every wallpaper SpreadPaper makes is one photograph laid across the displays you actually have, however many that is. What changes between the three kinds is how many photographs you hand it, and what decides when they change.

Two of the three ask for no second display at all. A Light and Dark pair and a day on a schedule are worth having on a single screen, and a laptop on its own is a perfectly ordinary way to run this.

Photographs by Simon Lohmann, Antony Sklivagkos, Michał Parzuchowski and Benjamin Voros on Unsplash.
  1. 06:00Sunrise
  2. 12:00Midday
  3. 18:00Evening light
  4. 23:00The Milky Way

Dynamic, up to 16 images

A whole day on a schedule

Up to 16 photographs, each with a start time you set on the clock. SpreadPaper writes them into a HEIC dynamic desktop carrying the time metadata macOS reads, so every screen turns over at the same moment.

The laptop sits lower than the monitor, so it shows the lower part of the picture, which is what macOS does with a real arrangement. Light half by Ganapathy Kumar, dark half by Michaela, both on Unsplash.
  • LightThe beach
  • DarkThe palms

Light & Dark, two images

A pair that follows the appearance

Hand SpreadPaper two photographs, one for light appearance and one for dark. Switch your Mac yourself and the wallpaper follows on every display at once. Set Appearance to Auto and macOS makes the switch on the same schedule Night Shift runs on.

Photograph by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash.

Static, one image

One photograph, every display

Drag a wide photograph into place on a canvas that mirrors your real display arrangement, and it goes up as one continuous picture. It stays there until you change it.

The editor

Place the wallpaper exactly where your monitors sit

The canvas is your display arrangement, the one macOS already knows about: the same sizes, the same order, the same gaps. Drop a photograph on it and drag, and it snaps to the middle and to the edges as it passes them, so what you line up here is what lands on the glass.

An ultrawide with a display stood on its end beside it, laid out the way the Mac reports them, and the editor's own controls floating over the bottom of the canvas. The hairline rectangle is what the render keeps, and the photograph reaching past it is cropped away.

Zoom, fit and flip

A small set of controls floats over the bottom of the canvas: zoom between 10 and 300 per cent, fit the image to the canvas in one click, and mirror it horizontally when the composition reads better the other way round.

One file for every screen

Each display gets its own rendered file, keyed on the display ID rather than the name, so two identical monitors never end up sharing one picture. Wallpapers go up one at a time, so a second click cannot overtake the first.

Look before you save

Preview puts the wallpaper on your screens with the editor still open, so you can judge it where it will live. Save keeps it as a preset, and Save & Apply does both at once.

Bezel compensation

The picture carries on behind the monitor bezels

Monitor bezels sit in the middle of a spread photograph. SpreadPaper pushes the displays apart by the width of the bezel between them, so a ridge meets on the far side instead of jumping. Give every display the same width, or each one its own, and monitors of different sizes and resolutions still line up.

Download

Download SpreadPaper, free and open source

SpreadPaper is a native macOS app released under the MIT licence. Every version ships from GitHub as a DMG and a ZIP, with no account to make and nothing to pay for.

Download the latest releaseView the source

What it needs

macOS
15.0 Sequoia or later
Mac
Apple Silicon
Displays
One is enough for a Light and Dark pair or a day on a schedule. Two or more to carry one photograph across them
Download
DMG or ZIP, from the GitHub releases page
Licence
MIT, free and open source

On an Intel Mac or an older macOS? Open a feature request and say so.

Apple could not verify SpreadPaper is free of malware

That is the wording macOS uses for any app not signed with a paid Apple Developer ID. Nothing has been found in SpreadPaper, and nothing has been scanned: the check is for a signature, not for malware. You do not have to take that on trust, because the source is public and every release is built from it by GitHub Actions.

Take either route below. It takes a minute, and only the first time.

Through System Settings

  1. Drag SpreadPaper to your Applications folder.
  2. Open it, then click Done on the warning.
  3. Open System Settings, then Privacy and Security, and scroll to the bottom.
  4. Click Open Anyway, then confirm with Open.

Or in Terminal, before you open it

Drag SpreadPaper to your Applications folder, then run this. It skips the warning entirely.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SpreadPaper.app

The check is called Gatekeeper. Signing an app to satisfy it costs 99 dollars a year, which is not a cost this project carries.