DesktopCollage

DesktopCollage icon

A live photo collage that lives on your desktop — behind your Finder icons, like a wallpaper you can rearrange.

Drop in your photos and they land as a scrapbook of framed Polaroids, right on the desktop, underneath your icons and windows. Drag them around, rotate, crop, and pin them where you like. Keep a different collage on each monitor. It’s a wallpaper that’s alive and yours to arrange — not a static export, and not a floating window sitting on top of your work.

Features

  • Behind your icons — the collage renders on the desktop layer, above the wallpaper and below your Finder icons. It’s there, not in the way.
  • Directly manipulable — drag, rotate, crop and pin each photo. Snapping and smart guides help you line things up; nothing is destructive (your originals are never touched).
  • Scrapbook aesthetic — white Polaroid mats, a little scatter and tilt, and a menu-bar home. No Dock clutter, no window.
  • Multiple collages, per monitor — create named collages and assign a different one to each display, the way you pick wallpapers in System Settings.
  • Your photos, in plain sight — everything lives in a Desktop Collage.collagelibrary package in your ~/Pictures folder: one folder per collage, your real photo files inside, nothing locked away.
  • Add from anywhere — pull in pictures straight from your Photos library or from files, or just drag-and-drop onto the collage.

Download

⬇ Download DesktopCollage 1.0

macOS 14 or later. Free.

First launch

The app is signed but not notarized by Apple (it’s a personal build, not from the App Store), so the first launch takes one extra step:

  1. Unzip and drag DesktopCollage.app into Applications.
  2. Double-click it — macOS will refuse the first time. Click Done.
  3. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, and next to the note about DesktopCollage, click Open Anyway.

You only do this once. Or, from Terminal:

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

DesktopCollage is a menu-bar app — look for the little photos icon in your menu bar to add photos, edit the collage, or switch which collage shows on each display.