Eons ago, there was a (paid) 3rd-party program for MacOS Classic that would give you a slideshow desktop background. The images were of the Golden Gate bridge, and were a timelapse over the course of a day. The changes were (afair) synced to your local solar time, so 'sunset' in the desktop background would line up with your local sunset.
I'd have to search to find the name of the program, but I kind of wish I had it back.
To be fair, most built in wallpapers in macOS do have a day/night version (for example Sonoma), or multiple versions with sunrise/day/sunset/night (Ventura, Monterey, Big sur). Apple does call them Dynamic backgrounds and they will switch automatically during the day.
Also, I hate to do this but if I'm allowed, tinniest plug, I do maintain a screensaver project for macOS that does video both screensaver and wallpaper integration with solar time adaptation : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io (the default download will give you the app that does the wallpaper integration).
Well, it's not for MacOS, but software to run animated wallpapers exist for Windows.
One example is the very popular WallpaperEngine [0]. Another cool one (and open source) is Lively Wallpaper [1].
Selfless plug: I've also developed and released LumoTray [2] which is a wallpaper/screensaver manager for windows with some other extra features but without any animated wallpapers except slideshows as I still find it a bit of a resource waste for something that I rarely see.
There was one of these apps for early versions of OS X too.
I’ve searched for it several times, but as far as the web is concerned it never existed. Would really like to find it because its default desktop picture was pleasant (during the day, a blue sky over a field of flowers if I recall correctly) and it would be nice to see it again.
Sadly a lot of early-mid-00s Mac shareware like that has seemingly vanished.
Eons ago, there was a (paid) 3rd-party program for MacOS Classic that would give you a slideshow desktop background. The images were of the Golden Gate bridge, and were a timelapse over the course of a day. The changes were (afair) synced to your local solar time, so 'sunset' in the desktop background would line up with your local sunset.
I'd have to search to find the name of the program, but I kind of wish I had it back.