Troubleshooting

This page covers version 1.31 on macOS 27 Golden Gate. If you are running version 1.28 or earlier on macOS 11 Big Sur to macOS 26 Tahoe, the app works differently and has its own troubleshooting page for macOS 11 to 26.

How it works, and why that matters

Boring Old Menu Bar does not touch the menu bar itself. It changes your wallpaper: it renders a copy of your current desktop picture with a solid bar painted across the top, exactly where the menu bar sits, and sets that copy as the wallpaper. The menu bar you see is still Apple’s; it simply has something opaque behind it.

Version 1.29 renders that copy from the wallpaper file itself. Earlier versions took a screenshot of the desktop, which stopped working on recent systems. Rendering needs no Screen Recording permission, cannot produce a black or grey wallpaper, and keeps the scaling and fill colour you chose in System Settings. Version 1.31 reads which wallpaper you chose straight from the macOS wallpaper settings, because what macOS reports to applications is a placeholder for most of Apple’s own choices, and writes that choice back exactly when you switch the app off.

Two consequences follow from this design, and most of this page is about them:

every time the app updates the wallpaper there is a brief moment where the menu bar is transparent again
anything that changes the wallpaper (Spaces, dynamic wallpapers, slide shows, resolution changes) means another update

It’s not working!

Left-click the menu bar icon and check that the switch at the top left is on. The status line at the bottom of the window tells you what the app is doing.
If the wallpaper does not change within a few seconds, right-click the icon and choose Force Update.
The app notices a new Space, a changed wallpaper or a changed resolution as it happens and acts about half a second later (two seconds after a display change). Once the wallpaper has been changed, it stays changed.
If the main window says that a display is left alone because its desktop picture cannot be rendered, read Wallpapers the app cannot render below.
If a display shows no bar at all, right-click the icon and check that it is not listed under Always Ignore these Displays or Ignore these Displays in this Configuration.
If the menu bar is a flat light or dark grey strip and none of the above changes anything, Reduce Transparency is on. macOS then paints its own opaque menu bar over the wallpaper, and with it over the app’s bar. See the next section.

Reduce Transparency hides the bar

With Reduce Transparency switched on, macOS no longer lets the wallpaper show through the menu bar. It draws a solid grey bar of its own instead, light grey in light mode and dark grey in dark mode, and that bar covers whatever the wallpaper shows underneath, including the bar painted by Boring Old Menu Bar. The app does its work as usual, but you cannot see any of it: the menu bar looks exactly as it did before you installed the app.

Switch it off in System Settings, Accessibility, Display, with the Reduce transparency switch.

On macOS 26 and 27 there is a second way to reach the same setting, and it is easy to hit by accident: the Liquid Glass slider in System Settings, Appearance. Its rightmost position is Reduce Transparency. Drag the slider all the way to the right and Reduce Transparency switches itself on; drag it back towards the middle and it switches off again. System Settings mentions this in small print under the slider (“When Reduce Transparency is on, adjusting Liquid Glass may turn this setting off”). If you never touched the Accessibility settings and the bar is still missing, check the slider. Thanks to the customer who worked this one out.

The bar behind the menu bar is only as opaque as the wallpaper macOS draws, so check what is being drawn:

If the menu bar is a flat grey instead of your chosen colour, see Reduce Transparency hides the bar above.
If you use Solid Color or Custom Image in Boring Old Menu Bar, the picture you chose in System Settings is ignored while the app is on; that is expected.

Wallpapers the app cannot render

macOS does not give applications the picture file for every choice in the Wallpaper settings. A “Your Photos” shuffle, a picture from the Photos library, and the aerials, which includes the Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater and Earth collections and everything in the Dynamic Wallpapers section apart from the Golden Gate default, only exist inside Apple’s wallpaper agent. Version 1.31 leaves such a display alone rather than painting a bar on a placeholder, and the main window says so for each display concerned. Your choice is restored exactly when you switch the app off, collections and aerials included.

If you want the bar on such a display, set Wallpaper to Solid Color or to a Custom Image of your own. The app then has a plain picture to work with.

Which wallpaper the app uses

At the bottom of the main window, the Wallpaper popup decides what goes underneath the bar:

Current Wallpaper: the picture you chose in System Settings, rendered by the app. Dynamic wallpapers get the frame macOS would show for light or dark mode, the time of day or the position of the sun.
Solid Color: a flat colour of your choice. No picture, no dynamic changes, the smoothest option.
Custom Image: a picture file of your own, with Stretch, Aspect Fit or Aspect Fill scaling. Set it with Set Custom Image…, or right-click the icon and choose Save Current Wallpaper as Custom Image… to turn whatever is showing right now into a static picture.

If you like one of Apple’s wallpapers but not the updates that come with it, saving it as a custom image is the simplest fix.

Apple’s system pictures are downloaded

Since macOS 14, most of Apple’s built-in desktop pictures are not on your Mac at all: System Settings downloads them when you pick one and the wallpaper agent throws the file away again. The app therefore downloads its own copy from Apple when it first has to render one of them; the status line shows the progress and the display is left alone until the picture has arrived. The copies live in the app’s folder in Application Support. Right-click the icon and choose Remove Downloaded System Pictures… to delete them; a picture that is still in use is downloaded again the next time it is rendered.

Folder shuffles

A shuffle of a folder of pictures, set up in System Settings, is run by the app itself: it reads the folder, the frequency and the Randomly setting from the Wallpaper settings and moves on to the next picture at that interval, rendering the bar onto each one. Every change of picture is one wallpaper update, with its brief moment of transparency, so a five-second shuffle is a poor companion for the app.

Dynamic wallpapers

Dynamic wallpapers change through the day, so the rendered copy has to be refreshed. The app works out when the picture’s next frame is due and renders again at that moment; there is no refresh interval to pick any more, and nothing is refreshed when nothing changes. While a change is scheduled, the status line at the bottom of the main window reads Ready. Next desktop picture change at …. A time-of-day picture changes a handful of times a day, and a light-and-dark picture changes when the appearance does. Each change is one wallpaper update, with its brief moment of transparency.

If you are on macOS 26 Tahoe with version 1.28 and a dynamic wallpaper is not working, the causes and fixes are different, because that version takes screenshots; they are covered on the troubleshooting page for macOS 11 to 26.

Automatically React to Changes

With Automatically React to Changes ticked, the app updates the wallpaper on its own when you switch between light and dark mode, change a display’s resolution, plug a display in or out, wake the Mac from sleep, or pick another wallpaper in System Settings. It waits half a second after a change before it acts, two seconds after a display change, so that a burst of changes, such as a display waking up and settling on a resolution, results in one update instead of several. The Reaction Delay setting of earlier versions is gone.

If you find the updates distracting and your setup never changes, untick it. You can always update by hand with Force Update or by switching the app off and on again.

Using multiple desktops, aka Spaces

Each Space has its own wallpaper, and macOS gives applications no way to find out which Spaces exist or which one is showing. The app can therefore only change the wallpaper of the Space you are currently on. Keep Automatically React to Changes ticked and it will catch each Space as you visit it; to speed things up, visit each of your Spaces in turn and pause a moment on each. The app remembers each Space’s own picture, so coming back to a Space does not need another update.

Every Space with a different wallpaper is one more wallpaper to keep updated, so if you run many Spaces, a solid colour or a single custom image keeps things calm.

If Displays have separate Spaces is switched off in System Settings, Mission Control, only one display has a menu bar. Right-click the icon and tick the other displays under Ignore these Displays in this Configuration so they keep their untouched wallpaper. Always Ignore these Displays does the same regardless of which other displays are connected.

Switching the app off, and getting your wallpaper back

Switching the app off restores the original wallpaper on every screen. If something went wrong before it could, for example after a crash, the app restores it the next time it runs. If you ever see a wallpaper with a bar painted on it while the app is off, set your wallpaper again in System Settings, Wallpaper; the copies with the bar live only in the app’s own folder and are never written to your original picture.

Disk space: the macOS wallpaper cache

Since macOS 26 Tahoe, macOS keeps a rendered copy of every picture that has ever been set as a wallpaper in a cache belonging to its Wallpaper Agent, and it never clears that cache (Apple bug FB20636593). A single copy is around 60 MB for a 5K display. That is harmless if you change your wallpaper a few times a year, but every update Boring Old Menu Bar makes is a new wallpaper, so with dynamic wallpapers, several Spaces or displays that come and go, the cache can grow by many gigabytes within weeks. It shows up in System Settings, General, Storage as System Data, not as anything belonging to the app.

Version 1.30 deals with this in two ways:

if a rendering has not changed since the last update, the app sets the same file again instead of writing a new one, so macOS reuses the cache entry it already has
after every update, and shortly after launch, the app deletes the cache entries it created itself for pictures that are no longer showing. Entries left behind by earlier versions are found and removed as well, so the first clean after updating may free a lot of space

Only entries the app created are ever touched. Your own wallpapers, Apple’s wallpapers and the entries for the pictures currently showing are never deleted.

Granting access to the cache folder

macOS protects the cache folder, so the app cannot clean it until you have allowed it to, once. The first time it tries, it explains why it needs access and offers Grant Access…. That opens a file dialog already pointing at the right folder: click Grant Access without changing the selected folder. The permission is remembered from then on. If you choose a different folder, the app tells you so and you can try again from the menu.

Choose Not Now and the app asks again the next time it launches. Choose Turn Off Cache Cleaning and it never asks again, until you tick the setting back on.

Right-click the icon:

Clean macOS Wallpaper Cache Automatically: ticked by default. Untick it if you would rather manage the cache yourself.
Clean macOS Wallpaper Cache Now…: runs a clean immediately and reports how many entries and how much space were removed. If the app has no access yet, this is also where you grant it.
Show macOS Wallpaper Cache in Finder: opens the cache folder so that you can see what is in there and delete what you like. The folder is in your home folder at Library/Containers/com.apple.wallpaper.agent/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.wallpaper.caches/extension-com.apple.wallpaper.extension.image. Deleting entries that belong to other pictures does no harm; macOS simply renders them again the next time they are set.

Only the rounded corners, please

Set the Menu Bar Style to Transparent (Screen Corners only) and the app leaves the menu bar alone and draws only the rounded corners you pick under Screen Corners.

Right-click the icon and choose Hide Menu Bar Icon. Be aware that with the icon hidden you cannot reach the settings. How to get the icon back explains the way out: quit the app from Activity Monitor, relaunch it, and untick the setting within the 10 seconds the icon stays visible.

Best setups for specific situations

Every wallpaper update comes with a brief moment of transparency. The defaults catch all the common cases; these combinations keep the updates to a minimum.

Static wallpaper, one desktop, nothing ever changes

untick Automatically React to Changes

No updates at all.

Dynamic wallpaper, otherwise nothing changes

nothing to set: the picture is rendered again only when its next frame is due

One update per frame change, a handful a day.

Spaces, or displays and resolutions that change often

tick Automatically React to Changes

One update whenever something changes.

Lots of Spaces and an Apple wallpaper collection

set Wallpaper to Solid Color, or save the picture you like with Save Current Wallpaper as Custom Image…

One wallpaper for everything, nothing to refresh.

Uninstalling and reinstalling

To uninstall completely:

right-click the icon and choose Clean macOS Wallpaper Cache Now…, so that the copies the app left in the macOS wallpaper cache are removed while the app can still tell them apart from everybody else’s
switch the app off, so that your original wallpapers are restored, then quit it
in the Finder, hold down the Option key, open the Go menu and choose Library
in Application Support, move the Boring Old Menu Bar folder to the Bin
optionally, delete net.publicspace.Boring-Old-Menu-Bar from the Preferences folder as well

If a wallpaper with a bar on it is still showing, set your wallpaper again in System Settings, Wallpaper.

To reinstall, launch the application again.

Still on macOS 26 or earlier?

Version 1.28 and earlier work by taking a screenshot of your wallpaper, and several things on this page do not apply to them. Use the troubleshooting page for macOS 11 to 26 instead.