Changing the Login Screen Wallpaper on Mac OS X
You may be thinking, “Why on earth would I change the login screen wallpaper?”
Well this one is purely down to personal preference as an admin and give’s you that “Oh lala” of customisation to make your Macs stand out from the crowd. If your brand perception is key to you and your company then this quick tutorial is the one for you:
Creating your Wallpaper
Firstly you’ll need an wallpaper image to get started, I designed mine 1920 x 1080 (HD) in Photoshop and saved this into a PNG format. A couple of things to take into consideration when designing an image is, that elements such as text and buttons on the Mac OS X login screen are white so ideally a darker background would complement these elements rather well.
The PNG ideally needs to be as smallest file size as possible, Apple’s standard Login Screen Background is 512KB to put this into context. You can download the one I used here.
Renaming the Default Login Screen Wallpaper
Just to be on the safe side let’s go ahead and rename the default Login Screen wallpaper, fire up terminal and use these commands:
cd /Library/Caches
mv com.apple.desktop.admin.png com.apple.desktop.admin.old
Renaming your Custom Login Screen Wallpaper
Now we need to rename your custom login screen wallpaper to com.apple.desktop.admin.png, to do this you’ll need to enter the following command:
mv /path/to/yourwallpaper.png com.apple.desktop.admin.png
Setting your Custom Login Screen Wallpaper
Now you have renamed the default image and renamed the custom image to the correct filename all that’s left to do is copy it over to the correct location, which is /Library/Caches, you can use the simple copy command here:
cp /path/to/renamed-com.apple.desktop.admin.png /Library/Caches/
The Result
Now log out and voila your Login Screen background should now be changed!
List of Names Login Window
Name and Password Login Window
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Be creative as your mind lets you!
Let me know how you guys get on, or if you have any troubles getting this to work.
