14 DAY TRIAL // There are a lot of wallpaper changers on Windows 10, and when I say “a lot” I really mean it. But on the other hand, most of them are Win32, which means not only that the installer must be downloaded manually, but also that you lose some key Windows 10 features, like support for live tiles and deeper integration into the OS.
Dynamic Theme, an app that comes with a pretty self-explanatory name, is one of the most advanced wallpaper changers currently available in the Microsoft Store. And because it’s published in the Store, it can be installed on all Windows 10 versions, including those that are blocked from running Win32 software, like Windows 10 in S Mode.
Offered with a free license, Dynamic Theme is clearly built to offer a native Windows 10 experience, and it all starts with the UI.
The look of the app mimics the one of the Settings app in Windows 10, and this isn’t at all a bad thing. Using Dynamic Theme is a super-familiar experience for Windows 10 users just because of this, and thanks to its straightforward menu options, navigating across its settings and activating specific options is a breeze.
Dynamic Theme supports both the light and the dark themes in Windows 10, but it can also follow the system settings. This means that if you set Windows 10 to dark, it uses the dark mode too. If the light visual style is enabled in Windows 10, it uses the same mode as well.
Multi-language support is also offered, and the app offers support for Microsoft accounts in order to provide synchronization. In other words, you can have your settings roaming from one device to another should you decide to log in with your Microsoft credentials.
In terms of features, there’s no doubt you’re going to be impressed.
First of all, Dynamic Theme lets you change the wallpaper of the desktop and the lock screen. And for both of them, it uses multiple sources, as it follows:
| The system settings |
| A specific photo that users can define |
| The Bing homepage of the day |
| Windows Spotlight |
| A specific Bing image |
| A specific Windows Spotlight image |
| A slideshow |
Furthermore, you can manually browse the entire collection of wallpapers, like the backgrounds that have been used on Bing or Windows Spotlight in the past, and choose one as background.
Like Windows 10, you can pick from multiple modes for a wallpaper to fit your desktop, like fill, fit, stretch, and center. I used the fill mode with the Bing homepage of the day photo on a screen with a 1920x1080 pixels resolution and everything was just fine.
In addition to setting a new wallpaper on the desktop and the locks screen, Dynamic Theme also offers management options for the daily Bing and Windows Spotlight images.
You can get alerts when new images are available with a preview (so you can preview them before setting as wallpaper), auto-save the photos to a user-defined folder, and even create a live tile in the Start menu that uses the most recent photo as background.
The daily Bing image option also lets you choose other regions, as Microsoft provides users with different wallpapers specifically tailored to their location.
And because downloading wallpapers from Microsoft servers is a key feature of the app, Dynamic Theme also integrates an option to disable getting new backgrounds if a metered connection is being used.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Dynamic Theme is hands down the best wallpaper changer for Windows 10. Available with a freeware license, published in the Microsoft Store, and based on an interface that Windows 10 users will find very familiar, Dynamic Theme is an application that adopters of Microsoft’s latest operating system should really try out.
Dynamic Theme has pretty much everything you’d need if you want to use Microsoft’s Bing or Windows Spotlight as the source of your wallpapers.
If there’s anything else that I’d want to see in this app, it’s an option to choose when to set the new wallpapers. For example, I prefer to set a new background in the morning when I arrive at the office, so letting me choose the time when the app should kick in would be quite handy.
But in the end, there’s really not much to complain about Dynamic Theme. This is a gem, there’s no doubt about it, and I can only hope the dev would continue to ship updates despite Microsoft’s rumored transition from UWP back to Win32.
