In this lesson we will customize the desktop. In front of us here we see a blank desktop, there are no items in this desktop and it's currently using one of the macOS Monterey backgrounds. To change this background, I can right click anywhere in my desktop and choose change desktop background. This will open the desktop and screensaver window but I will close it for a moment and access the same window by going to the app menu, then system preferences, then desktop and screensaver and we are right back to where we were. Our first option is to set our background image to a dynamic option, or light or dark. The dynamic option means that the shade of the background image changes to a lighter shade during daytime hours but then dims down to darker tones during night hours and this is based on your computer's time settings. If you don't want this dynamic option you can choose to use the light option which displays lighter tones, or we can change it to dark which changes the background image to darker tones. Both light and dark options are non-dynamic options meaning they are still and don't change. Then down here we see some other background images, the ones that have a cloud icon with a down arrow. This means that we need to download this image first and if we want to use it, I can just click on the cloud icon and it starts to download for me. This group of images are in the dynamic desktop category and so they can be set up as either a dynamic, light or dark. If I click on this background, I can see how it looks by changing between the different options. I also have some other light and dark options I can choose from. And the next background section is the desktop pictures, these don't have light and dark options so they are as is and don't change by the time of day. If you don't want images as your background you could make it a solid color by clicking on colors on the left panel here, and from here you can pick any of these solid colors, or click on custom color and have your pick as you like. You can also use the color picker icon then go to any color on the screen and pick that color. So let's hover over the red color in the safari icon and now our background color is that same red color. You could also make your background from an image in your photos or any image in any other folder of your choosing. Another option we can do is change the background image every certain time interval. To do so, I will click on one of the main folders like Apple, and then down here I'll check the box for change picture, and set the when option as I please. So if I set it to every five seconds you can see this change in action. And right now it's going through these images in order but you can also randomize it by clicking this option. So now the desktop background is changing every five seconds by going through the images in a random sequence. Now I will revert the desktop background to the normal option I had at the beginning of this video. Next, we have the screensaver tab. Here you can customize your screensaver to start after whichever time interval you choose. Then on the left, you can pick the screensaver of your choice and it shows up in the preview window. You can also use random screensavers just like what we saw with a desktop background. You can also show the clock with a screensaver and to see your settings in full preview, I will go up here, then click on preview. So this is what the screensaver will look like in full mode, and I see the time displayed as well. And to exit, I just move my mouse or click any key. Then at the bottom right corner of these settings we have hot corners, and as this dialogue box shows, we can customize certain tasks to happen when we move our mouse to any of the four corners of our screen. Right now, I'm only using the bottom right corner to display the desktop. This is handy when I have several windows open and I want to see my desktop in an easy step. So let me open up Safari as well as the TextEdit app and to access my desktop quickly, I'll move my mouse to the bottom right corner, and now all the apps are pushed away to make way for my desktop. And to return to the other view, again, I just click at any edge and I'm back to the windows once again. So back to the hot corner's dialogue box, I can configure any corner to do any of these options or I can do nothing at all. I originally had my top right corner as the option to show the desktop, but I noticed it conflicted with me going to the menu bar icons in the right top corner. So I made my bottom right corner, my hot corner as I rarely ever go there for any other functionality. Now, let me close a few things that are opened and go back to a clean view of my desktop once again. Other things we can customize on the desktop are the folder names and the folder icons. I'll create a new folder on my desktop by right clicking and choosing new folder or the name, I can customize the name by using emojis. I'll launch my emojis by going to the edit menu, then emojis and symbols. I'll now change the folder's name to three hearts and to customize the folder icon, I will open the image that I want to use for the folder icon. Then I will go to the edit menu, then copy this image. Then I will right click on the folder and go to get info, this window appears and up here I will click on the folder icon to select it. Then I will go to the edit menu again but this time I will choose paste and now our folder has a customized icon. Another thing we can also customize in our desktop is the view options, I will right click anywhere in the desktop and choose show view options. From this window, I can customize the size of the folder icon to be bigger or smaller, I can also control the size of the text for the folder's name, as well as place the text to the right of the icon instead of at the bottom. So in this lesson we saw multiple ways to customize our desktop like modifying the background, the colors, and folder icons as well as the folder names. Thanks for watching.
