Use real-time weather as wallpaper for your Samsung phone

It’s still summer, so let’s talk about the weather. Actually, I don’t want to talk about the weather at all, but about what my smartphone tells me. Thanks to smartphones and the availability of countless weather apps, we always have the current weather displayed on our screens, making it easier to know what to wear or whether to take an umbrella with us. With One UI 6.1 and the Galaxy S24 Ultra (review), Samsung offers a completely different way of showing us the weather: by using the wallpaper function and having the current weather displayed in real time!

This is an exclusive feature for the lock screen. You can take a photo and set it as wallpaper to display the current weather taking into account the time of day. Samsung has not made this feature obvious to everyone, so we will show you what you need to do to set a wallpaper that displays the weather in real time on the lock screen. Let’s go!

How to enable real-time weather wallpaper

Before you can use this feature, you’ll first need to delve into the depths of your smartphone. Samsung requires you to enable it in Labs first before it appears in the wallpaper settings. Here’s what you need to do:

1. start Settings.
2. Go to Advanced features.
3. Choose Laboratories.
4. Choose Photo wallpapers for the environment.
5. Activate Photo background.

You can then access the “photo wallpaper” via the wallpaper settings.

How to set your photo as real-time weather wallpaper

Now that the feature has been activated, proceed as usual if you want to assign a new wallpaper to the lock screen. Here’s how to do it:

1. Long press any empty space on the Home screen.
2. Choose Wallpaper and style (You can also go through the settings).
3. Now select Change background image.
4. Choose Photo surroundings in the “Creative” category.
5. When a pop-up window appears to set up the Weather app, select Agree.
6. Select a photo for your background.
7. Adjust the position of the photo on the screen.
8. Tap the Play icon to preview the weather animation on the background image.
9. Choose Completed to apply the animated effects.

Now that you have your photo on the lock screen, you can see at a glance whether it’s sunny, raining or snowing. The AI ​​also adjusts the image depending on the time of day, so that the photo is darker at night. Samsung has given us very little information about this. The feature is not hidden in the Labs menu for fun, but is currently in development. This can lead to errors, so that night photos sometimes look unrealistic and the current weather or time of day is displayed with a slight delay.

Try it with different scenes to see what works best. In general, it is recommended to use outdoor shots for a better experience.

Something else about compatibility: The feature was rolled out with the One UI 6.1 update and I tested it on a Galaxy S24 Ultra. So the feature should also be available on the newer flagships, including foldables like the Galaxy Z Fold 6 (test). However, not all models updated to One UI 6.1 have all the features that Galaxy AI brings with it. So it’s best to check for yourself whether A-class devices, for example, also have this nice lock screen gimmick.

I’m curious to see how well this works on my smartphone, because so far I haven’t noticed many deviations in the almost always sunny weather. Let us know in the comments whether the function is already available on your Galaxy smartphone and how well it works.