Customize login window background on Snow Leopard

You can change your wallpaper very easily in Mac OS X; however, not so simple for the login window. If your system is password protected; that’s, when you navigate to “System Preference –> Accounts–>Login Options“, you should be able to see the setting as shown in the following image:

Automatic Login is "Off"

Every time when you try to log into your system, you will be prompt to key in your password for further access.

This is the default background for login window; probably you get tired of it already. Let’s go ahead and change to the one you like.

There are two different way to do that:

1. Changing the path of the background image
2. Download Loginox and let it does all the work for you

Obviously we don’t want to spend time working with Terminal to change the path of the background image — it’s easy to make mistakes and it’s not easy to change it back in the future if you forgot the command line. So for today, I will be using the nice little utility to do that.

First you will need to download Loginox here, mount up the .dmg file and simply drag the application to your Applications folder. Upon launch-up the program, you will be able to see the following interface:

What you need to do is to drag the image you like and drop it onto the box where it says “No image to set”. I personally like the Ubuntu wallpaper, so I drag it over and could see the following screen:

Simply click on “Set new Login image” and you are done. Just in case you would like to restore to the default image, there is a “reset” button there for you when you feel regret.

However, according to the official site, you might be interested to do something on the size of your image that’s going to be used:

The image size of the default image is 2560 x 1600 and has a ratio 8/5. You can prepare your images with Sizerox to have the right dimension and ratio for your customized login screen.