Use any music playlist to set your favorite album covers as lock screen wallpaper on your iPhone “iOS & iPhone :: Gadget Hacks

The music you listen to is often a reflection of your personality, which is why people tend to use artwork from their favorite albums as device wallpapers. But a single album cover may not appear correctly on your iPhone lock screen, and that is not indicative of your wider musical interests. To combine the cover art into a lock screen wallpaper, there is a shortcut that makes it easy to do for any playlist.

“Music Artwork Wallpaper by Playlist”, created by the user of RoutineHub entee, creates a unique background using the cover art of songs from a selected playlist. Whether you created the playlist yourself or added it to your music library from somewhere else, the shortcut can create and set the wallpaper in seconds. If your mood changes, you can always create a wallpaper from a different playlist using the same shortcut.

Preconditions

Like other wallpaper-centric shortcuts that have appeared recently, this one requires iOS 14.3 as it has the new “Set Wallpaper” action. If you don’t have it, it should come out overnight. If you can’t wait, you can sign up for Apple’s beta software program to get the release candidate now.

Apart from that, you need to install shortcuts. If you deleted the app for some reason, you can reinstall it from the App Store. Then whether you got it or just got it, make sure that “Allow untrusted shortcuts” is turned on in Settings -> Shortcuts.

Step 1: Choose a playlist to use

For the shortcut to start, you’ll need at least one playlist in the Music app. You can use one you already own and create your own playlist from scratch or add an existing one to your library. For this guide, I’ll add Apple’s official “Jazz” playlist to my library.

If you are using a playlist with tracks from your Apple Music subscription, songs must be added to your library for this to work. By default, all the tracks you add from Apple Music to a playlist are added to your library, but you might have turned it off via Settings -> Music -> Add songs to playlist, so you’ll want it to. reactivate.

If you want to use a custom playlist with this shortcut, you will need a good number of songs added. Even if you’ve added about 20 songs to your playlist, the shortcut may not work, but you can try. To be sure, use a playlist with at least 30 songs that have album art.

Step 2: add the “Music Artwork Wallpaper” shortcut

You can get the “Music Artwork Wallpaper by Playlist” shortcut using the direct link below or from RoutineHub, where the shortcut is regularly updated to fix bugs, add new features, and more. As of this writing, version 1.7 is the most recent.

Tap “Get Shortcut” and you will be taken to the Shortcuts app. Scroll to the bottom of the shortcut information window and press the red “Add untrusted shortcut” button to add the shortcut to your library.

Step 3: Assign the playlist to the shortcut

As soon as you press “Add untrusted shortcut”, you will be asked to configure the shortcut. In this case, it means choosing a playlist to extract the images from. So press “Choose”, select the playlist and press “Done” to finish.

Step 4: Create and set your album art wallpaper

In “My shortcuts”, find and tap the “Music artwork wallpaper by playlist” card to run the shortcut. The first time you do this, it will ask you to grant it access to your music library. Press “OK”, then the shortcut will work for a few seconds while it extracts album covers from the playlist.

When complete, a check mark will flash on the shortcut, indicating that the wallpaper has been created and placed on your lock screen. Now lock your screen (for example, press the side button) and reactivate it (press the Home or side button, lift to wake up, tap the screen to wake up, etc.) to display the new wallpaper. screen.

By default, you will have eight rows and three columns of cover illustrations, but this can be changed (see next step). The order of the illustrations is random, so if you are not happy with the result, you can always re-run the shortcut to create a new wallpaper with the same covers or different covers in the playlist.

Step 5: Customize the shortcut (optional)

If you want something different with your wallpaper, you can go to the shortcut workflow and choose a new playlist to create a background and adjust the number of rows and columns. To perform any of these operations, press the ellipsis button (•••) at the top right of the shortcut card.

Editing the playlist

In the workflow, scroll down a bit until you find a card called Music with the action “Get songs [Playlist’s Name]. “Tap the current playlist and choose a different one to create a wallpaper from it. When you’re done, tap” Done, “then relaunch the shortcut.

Changing the grid size

At the top of the workflow, under the first action titled dictionary, you can choose the number of lines and illustrations per line. You can experiment, but if you go too big (like five by ten) you might not get a wallpaper because there might not be enough songs with covers to fill all of the boxes. If that’s all you want to change, hit “Done” to finish, then relaunch the shortcut.

Below you can see two different examples of musical artwork wallpaper; a four-by-eight grid (left) and a two-by-five grid (right).