AutoPaper

Moods

A mood is a set of keywords with its own Surprise: Rainy beach, Night city, Winter forest, whatever you like. One mood is current, and new wallpapers come from it. Switch from the Mood submenu in the menu bar or notification-area menu (or the tray on KDE), or in the window. Switching never makes a wallpaper by itself, so it never costs anything.

Everything else is shared between moods: the schedule, the providers, the budget, memory, and what AutoPaper has learned about your taste. So a new mood doesn’t start from nothing, and an idea you’ve had in one mood won’t come back in another as if it were new. Echoes favour wallpapers from the current mood.

Each mood’s own history

Each mood shows the wallpapers made in it, and History can show one mood at a time. Delete a mood and its wallpapers stay in History.

On a Mac, Your Moods sums them up when no mood is selected: how many wallpapers each has made, how many you liked, when it last made one, its latest few, and a chart of the last 30 days, kept on your Mac only. Windows and Linux don’t have the summary yet.

On a Mac: over your wallpaper

AutoPaper shows its wallpapers over your own, in a click-through layer above the desktop picture and below your icons, on every display and Space. Your own wallpaper is never touched, even if it’s one of macOS’s moving Aerials. Quit AutoPaper, or choose Restore My Wallpaper, and yours is there exactly as it was.

If you’d like AutoPaper’s wallpapers in Mission Control and on the lock screen too, choose As my wallpaper in Settings → General. It then replaces your desktop picture, after noting each display’s own; macOS’s moving wallpapers may not come back exactly.

On Windows and Linux: as your wallpaper

Neither has a supported way to draw beneath the desktop icons, so AutoPaper sets the real wallpaper. First it keeps a copy of your own, for each monitor, and it puts it back when AutoPaper quits or you choose Restore my wallpaper. On Windows that includes a slideshow or Windows Spotlight, and AutoPaper sets the lock screen too, unless you turn that off. On Linux, putting yours back works on GNOME for now, not yet on KDE or in a Flatpak.

Pause

Pause New Wallpapers stops new ones and leaves the one you have; New Wallpaper Now still works. That’s how it works on a Mac. On Windows and Linux, pausing still puts your own wallpaper back for now.

While it paints

A painting can take a few seconds or several minutes, so AutoPaper says what it’s doing (Composing an idea…, Checking memory…, Painting…, Preparing for your displays…) with a progress ring and the time left: About 6 minutes left. Meanwhile the wallpaper in AutoPaper’s window looks as if it’s being remade: on a Mac it ripples gently under a slow drift of its own colours, and on Windows and Linux a soft veil covers it. With reduced motion turned on, it holds still. Stop cancels.

Learned from your own computer

AutoPaper notes how long each provider and model took, at what size: the last 50 times for each, kept on your computer and never sent. The time left is estimated from those, the recent ones counting most. Until something has been recorded there’s no estimate: it never makes a number up. A local model reports each step as it paints, so its progress is exact.

The same estimates start scheduled wallpapers early, so each is ready when it’s due, and show next to each model in Settings (About 9 minutes per wallpaper on this Mac). They also let a slow local model take as long as it needs: AutoPaper gives up only when it stops making progress.

AutoPaper keeps a memory of every wallpaper it makes: its title, a one-line description, and what went into it. Before a new idea reaches your desktop, it’s compared with everything from your quiet period: one month, three months, six months, a year or two years, as you choose. If it’s too close to something you’ve had, AutoPaper asks again, naming what it was too close to. Wallpapers from before the quiet period count for less the further back they are.

The comparison runs on your computer with a small local model, so remembering costs nothing and sends nothing anywhere. Memory is kept even when old image files are cleared to save space (wallpapers you liked are never cleared), so years later it still knows what you’ve seen.

Echoes

Once an idea’s quiet period has passed, it can come back as an echo: the same kind of place, seen differently. Other weather, another hour or season, years of decay or renewal, a different distance, another era or medium. Never the old image itself. Each echo is linked to its original in your history, with a note saying what changed.

Echoes favour wallpapers you liked and never come from ones you disliked. You choose how often they come (never, rarely, sometimes or often), and you can ask for an echo of any wallpaper in your history.

History

Every wallpaper stays in History, newest first, with its title and date, and whether you liked it or it’s an echo. Show only the ones you liked, disliked or echoed, or one mood’s. Any of them can go back on your desktop, be liked or disliked, have an echo made, lead to its original and its echoes, or be found as a file.

What made each one

On a Mac, History is a grid or a gallery: the wallpaper large, a filmstrip, and everything about it. Its description, the mood and keywords it came from, and what wrote and painted it, at what size and estimated cost: Written by Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (Google Gemini) · Painted by Nano Banana 2 (Google Gemini) · 3840×2160 · about $0.04. Space opens Quick Look. Windows and Linux have the grid, without the gallery for now.

Learns what you like

Like or Dislike any wallpaper, from the app’s window, its menu or a notification, depending on your system. AutoPaper notes what each one was made of (the place and what’s in it, the palette, mood, style, light, weather and season) and keeps a tally. It leans towards what you’ve liked and away from what you haven’t. Older opinions count for less: each halves in weight after a year.

Taste is a hint, never a rule. Something you disliked can still turn up if your keywords call for it, and the more Surprise you allow, the less taste counts. Avoid is the rule: a keyword marked Avoid never appears.

Dislike can also replace the wallpaper straight away, within your budget. That’s on unless you turn it off.

What it costs

With OpenAI or Google, each wallpaper costs an estimated 3 to 15 cents with their default models, depending on the quality you choose and the size of your display, by their published prices in October 2026. Costlier models cost more. They bill you directly, on your own key; none of it goes to AutoPaper. With a local model it costs nothing beyond your own electricity.

You set a monthly budget ($5 unless you change it). AutoPaper estimates the cost of each wallpaper as it goes, shows the month’s spend in Settings (labelled as an estimate), and stops making new ones when the budget is used up.

When it can’t make a new one, because the budget is spent, you’re offline or the provider is down, it brings back a wallpaper you liked, which costs nothing. Or, if you prefer, it keeps the one you have.

Problems point to the fix

When something needs you, AutoPaper says so once, in plain words, as a link to where it’s fixed. A missing key is Add your OpenAI key, which opens Settings with that key’s field ready to type in; a painting ComfyUI couldn’t finish is Check ComfyUI in Settings. Buttons that can’t work until it’s fixed wait, and the window updates itself once it is.

Keyboard shortcuts

New Wallpaper Now is ⌘ R in the Mac’s Now view and Ctrl R on Linux; a new mood is ⌘ N or Ctrl N. Moods and keywords reorder from the keyboard, and History moves with the arrow keys. Every shortcut, per system, is on the Keyboard shortcuts page.

Accessibility

AutoPaper aims for WCAG 2.2 AA as W3C’s WCAG2ICT applies it to desktop software, and for each platform’s own accessibility guidelines. Each app has been checked in development builds through its system’s accessibility interface (the macOS accessibility API, UI Automation on Windows and AT-SPI on Linux), and what those checks found was fixed. Full passes with VoiceOver, Narrator and Orca are still to come; if something is hard to use, please open an issue.

What each app does:

• Every control and image has a spoken name. Each keyword says its weight (“rain, Must”), Surprise says its value, and the current mood says so (“Rainy beach, current mood”).
• Every wallpaper is described in words: its one-line description, plus the note for an echo.
• No meaning carried by colour alone: the current mood has a checkmark and the word, liked wallpapers a badge with the word.
• Little motion: wallpapers cross-fade, and the effect while painting holds still when reduced motion is on. New wallpapers can be paused.
• Standard controls throughout, so the system’s settings for contrast and transparency apply.

This website aims for WCAG 2.2 AA directly.

Privacy, in brief

• No account, no telemetry, no analytics, and no AutoPaper server. AutoPaper itself talks only to the providers you set up (and, on a Mac, to the update feed if you allow it).
• To write a scene, the provider gets the current mood’s keywords and Surprise, short descriptions of your 20 most recent wallpapers, from all your moods (so it doesn’t repeat them), a few things you’ve liked or disliked, your language (so titles and descriptions come back in it), and whether your computer is in light or dark mode (while Match my appearance is on). To paint it, the image provider gets the finished prompt, the size and the quality. Each request also names AutoPaper’s version and your system’s, and carries your IP address, as any request online does.
• Requests to OpenAI are sent with store: false, so they aren’t kept as stored conversations; Google’s API keeps no conversation to begin with. Each provider’s own data policy still applies.
• A free Gemini key comes with Google’s unpaid terms: what you send may be used to improve Google’s products and read by human reviewers. A paid project doesn’t, and in the EEA, Switzerland and the UK the paid terms apply either way. AutoPaper’s Settings say so.
• Your images, history, ratings, timings, spending and settings stay on your computer; what a hosted writer needs to write a scene is listed above. With local models, nothing leaves your network at all.

The whole account: who learns what, and every request, host by host.

Where the idea came from

From a Reddit post titled “Desktop Wallpaper Agent”. Its author described the idea, and said they wouldn’t be building it themselves. AutoPaper is an attempt to. The line at the top of this page, “Tell your computer what you’d like to see”, is the post’s own, and so is the black ocean with silver structures.

Who’s making it

Michael Sitarzewski, who also made AudioPaper, working with an AI coding assistant, Claude. The source code is MIT-licensed.