I finally tried Lively Wallpaper to animate my desktop — it's a dream for customization

Lively Wallpaper is free, open-source, and looks like a native part of Windows 11, though I found one specific feature that hits your system resources hard.

Lively Wallpaper includes several desktop backgrounds that are animated or interactive.

(Image credit: Future | Edited with Gemini)

Wallpapers are where it's at in 2026. After seeing so many people interested in the Windows 11 Bliss wallpaper and our Windows Central wallpaper, I took another look at an app for customizing wallpapers on Windows 11.

Lively Wallpaper lets you set animated and interactive wallpapers on your desktop. With it, you can make GIFs, videos, and webpages into wallpapers.

The app is also free and open-source, making it stand out from the ever-popular Wallpaper Engine that's available through Steam. If you already know you want to use animated wallpapers but need to compare Wallpaper Engine vs. Lively Wallpaper, we have you covered.

One thing I will point out is that what differentiates Lively Wallpaper from Wallpaper Engine is that Lively Wallpaper is designed with WinUI 3. Because of that, it feels right at home on Windows 11 and scales well to different screen sizes.

Lively Wallpaper comes with a pack of preinstalled wallpapers, but you can easily add more by clicking the "+" icon.

While it is possible to set a website as a wallpaper, I advise against using YouTube as a source. Doing so will result in an awkward experience of clicking through ads and having to maximize the video. Even if you have YouTube Premium, you'll have to click around a bit to get things to look good.

Lively Wallpaper's website states that the app has "~0% usage" when you are running fullscreen apps or games. In my testing, that has proven true on the CPU side of things. As I write this article, Lively Wallpaper is in the background doing nothing since I have Edge open fullscreen.

But some of your system's resources will still be used by Lively Wallpaper even when it is not active on your screen. Despite hovering between 0 percent to 0.3 percent CPU usage according to Task Manager, Lively Wallpaper currently uses 245.5MB of my PC's memory.

If I minimize Edge and other apps, Lively Wallpaper jumps to about 1 percent CPU usage and uses about 255MB of RAM.

I have a basic rainy day wallpaper with droplets moving around on my screen. Swapping to a YouTube video uses an astronomical 800MB of RAM. CPU usage also jumps to around 4.5 percent when showing the YouTube video as a wallpaper.

I'm on a workstation laptop with 32GB of RAM, so I don't especially care about an app taking up 255MB, or even 800MB, but I'd be less comfortable with that memory usage on a different PC. If you try the app, I'd love to hear how it performs on your system.

I'd argue that while using a YouTube video is possible, it's not the primary use case for this app. Lively Wallpaper is at its best when set to a lightly animated wallpaper.

Where do you get wallpapers for your PC?

I'm a bit surprised to see people so passionate about wallpapers. I've usually defaulted to basic ones or had a program swap them automatically. But having dipped my toe into the world of Windows wallpapers, I can see why it's a big part of PC customization for many.

Where do you get your wallpapers? Do you use any programs like Lively Wallpaper on your PC? Let me know in the comments.

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Posted Thursday 19 March 2026 at 12:30 pm AEST (my time).

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