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How to Automatically Update Your iPhone Wallpaper With Your Tasks

Apple Shortcuts can set your wallpaper without you touching Settings — which means your Lock Screen can rebuild itself around your to‑do list. Here’s how the automation works, how to build it yourself, and the two‑minute version.

The building blocks

Three Shortcuts capabilities make a self‑updating task wallpaper possible:

• The “Set Wallpaper” action — sets any image as your Lock Screen wallpaper, silently if “Show When Run” is off.
• App Intents — apps can expose actions that return data (like an image) to Shortcuts without the app opening on screen.
• Personal automations — triggers like “when App X opens” or “closes” that run a Shortcut automatically, with no confirmation prompt.

The DIY route (for tinkerers)

You can wire a basic version yourself with no third‑party app:

1. Create a Shortcut that takes your task text (from a note or a dictionary variable).
2. Use Make Rich Text from HTML → Make Image from Rich Text to turn the list into an image.
3. Pass the image to Set Wallpaper for the Lock Screen, with “Show When Run” disabled.
4. Add a personal automation (e.g. daily at 7:00) to run it.

The honest downsides: HTML‑to‑image output is plain and hard to make legible over a background; the wallpaper only refreshes on the schedule, not when your list actually changes; and editing tasks means editing a note or the Shortcut itself. It’s a fun build — and a maintenance chore.

The real route: Daylist’s ready‑made automation

Set it up once in the Shortcuts app:

1. Add your tasks in Daylist.
2. Open the Shortcuts app and go to the Automation tab in the bottom navbar.
3. Tap the + button in the top right corner.
4. Select App.
5. For “When”, select the Daylist app.
6. Select Is Closed.
7. Select Run Immediately so it runs with no confirmation prompt.
8. On the next screen, add Update Daylist Wallpaper from Shortcuts as the action.
9. Tap Done — every time you close Daylist, your wallpaper rebuilds in the background.

Why trigger on close instead of a timer?

A daily‑timer wallpaper is stale by 9am — you’ve already finished a task and added two more. Your list only changes when you interact with it, so “app closes” is the perfect trigger: the wallpaper updates the moment you’re done editing your list, and never wastes a run when nothing changed.