Because Space Gets Old

The Snow Leopard Login Screen

Apple is good at designing things simply and beautifully enough that users generally make little to no changes to their UI — but let’s face it, that space background gets pretty old after the first thousand logins, and they really should have included the login screen aesthetics in the system prefs.

You do not need any of the dozens of trashy apps floating around to tweak this. The methods for tweaking the login screen change with every major inception of OS X, as do the apps for changing hidden system prefs, but those apps all work by changing the system’s instructions themselves, rather than simply going to the source image and leaving the system alone. I’ve always preferred the safer, cleaner way of doing things, which is simply replacing the default images.

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Luckily, changing the login screen background is about as easy as opening the finder and swapping an image file. Just open the finder and hit shift+command+G, which brings up the Go To Folder dialogue, and enter this folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices

Once there, find the image file by the name of DefaultDesktop.jpg and make a copy of it somewhere safe. Now simply replace it with a .jpg of your choosing, so long as it’s 1920×1200 and renamed to DefaultDesktop.jpg — and don’t freak out when you’re asked to validate with an administrator password, since it’s a system folder.

The Apple Logo

As much as I appreciate how clean the OS X Apple logo is, I’ve always liked the vintage look. Just like the login screen’s background image, the Apple logo itself can be swapped out for an image of your choosing, so long as it matches the size and filetype of the original. You can also do the same with the “Mac OS X” underneath the logo.

The login window itself has a totally different folder full of goodies, here’s the path:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/loginwindow.bundle/Contents/Resources/

You’ll notice the veritable plethora of image files in there, all named quite nicely so there’s no confusion. You can swap any image ever involved in the workings of the login window, easy as copypasta, just make sure the sizes are always the same, and that you are sure to name them the same filename as the files they’re replacing — including the filetype. If the image you’re replacing is a .tif instead of a .tiff, then name your TIFF image as a .tif like it wants.

Happy tweaking :)