Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion both give you the option to change your desktop wallpaper every 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hourly or daily. However, you’d have to choose from the default wallpapers included, and they aren’t that great to look at. Of course, you could find your own wallpapers online to use, but it would be pretty time-consuming and would require you to download each one to your Mac. Wouldn’t it be easier if you had your own source of amazing desktop wallpaper on your Mac at your disposal to automatically add or remove when you choose? Well, that’s exactly what Kuvva does for you. Kuvva is a free Mac app that streams beautiful and creative wallpapers right to your Mac desktop. It runs silently in the background, while you go about your daily tasks. You can refresh your desktop wallpaper on your Mac manually or put Kuvva on auto-pilot; it’s up to you. With Kuvva, you’ll discover new artists and have something new to look at each day. Here’s how it all works.

  1. Download Kuvvaa from the Mac App Store.
  2. Check “Start Kuvva on login” if you want it to automatically run every time you start your Mac.
  3. Go through the short Welcome Tour for Kuvva; it will explain all of the important stuff and show you how things work. 4. Kuvva works right out of the box – meaning, you’ll see a brand new desktop wallpaper right away. Each time a new wallpaper is displayed, you’ll get a notification on your desktop with the title and artist’s name.

Customize Your Account

You’ll need to customize your account via the Preferences window, since you can create an account there, and also choose the types of wallpapers to use and how often to display them.

  1. Click on the menu bar icon and select Preferences.

  2. Click on the Account tab so that you can sign up for an account (or sign in if you already have an account).

  3. Click on the General tab once you’ve created your account. Here, you can choose which stream of backgrounds to use as your wallpaper: featured artist, popular, or favorites (hand-picked by you). Note: You can also change your active stream right from the menu bar icon via the Active Stream sub-menu.

  4. Next, you can choose how often to refresh your wallpaper: manually, weekly, daily, every 12 hours, or hourly.

  5. Finally, you can choose to display Kuvva on your menu bar or in the dock.

Customize Your Wallpapers

One of the cool things about Kuvva is that you can go to their website to view all the available wallpapers. You can then add individual wallpapers to your favorites and view them by choosing the “Favorites” stream on your Mac. Even though you can also add wallpapers to your favorites from your desktop (via the menu bar icon), it’s easier to do so from their website; you can see everything at a glance.

  1. Go to Kuvva’s website and sign in to your account.

  2. You can see featured and popular wallpapers, or click on “Explore” to see everything else.

  3. When you scroll your mouse over a wallpaper thumbnail, a heart icon will appear underneath; clicking on this will add it to your favorites. You can also see how many other users have added it to their favorites; this is represented by the number next to the heart icon.

  4. You can also click on a thumbnail to open it in a new page where you can share it on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. You can also download it in different sizes and view other wallpapers by that artist. Likewise, you can add it to your favorites from its individual page as well.

  5. You can just as easily remove wallpapers from your favorites by clicking on the heart icon again or by clicking on the menu bar icon on your Mac and selecting the “remove from favorites” option.

Conclusion

So as you can see, Kuvva is a very handy alternative to the Mac’s change wallpaper feature. It’s easy to setup,  extremely customizable, and will save you time. If you’re pressed for time, you can simpley install Kuvva, create an account, choose any featured or popular wallpapers, and go on your merry way. If you have a little more time, you can browse through their collection and choose your own wallpapers to use. Do you use Kuvva? If so, let us know what you think of it.