In macOS Monterey, you can now use your Memoji in a whole new place – your Lock Screen! Here’s how to set it up and what it does. To enable this feature, we need to make sure that our Memoji is set properly as our profile picture both for our iCloud account and the login account to our Mac. So, we’ll go into System Preferences and then we’ll go into Users and Groups. From here on my account on the side, you can see that I’ve got a Memoji there already – but this is a static image on my teal background. It’s not a live Memoji if you will. If we tap on to edit, we then bring up the new profile picture picker – gosh that’s a tongue twister! – and from here we can then choose our own Memoji as our profile picture.

Now on my screen here, you can see a variety of Memojis that I’ve made over the years. I’m going to choose the one that’s just my face. When I’ve chosen the Memoji that I want for my account, you’ll see in the bottom left corner of that window my old picture has gone and now I’ve got my Memoji there instead. At the moment it’s got a default pose and a default color, but at the top of the screen, we can change these two. Unfortunately, I find these both options quite limiting (I would much rather choose my own custom pose because some of these are a little bit odd). I’d also rather choose a color that I want particularly rather than one of the defaults. That being said, I’ll choose a pose which looks kind of normal and then I can choose my background color as well. I’m going to choose green to match my iMac, and then in the bottom left corner, you’ll see that Memoji profile picture is nearly complete.

But I feel like my face is a little bit too small in that circle… I can use a little sliding bar there to enlarge the Memoji to better fill that frame. You can choose how big or how small you want this – I’m going to go for this sort of size here. Okay, now as we come out of our Users and Groups options, you’ll notice that that picture has also changed on my iCloud ID at the top of System Preferences. That’s because my login is tied to my Apple ID so both pictures change interchangeably. This is a little bit annoying because again I’d rather have my teal background picture, but for now, I’m going to keep it like this. Then we’re going to log out of this user account and go back to the Login Screen and straight away you can see that my profile picture is now alive and moving! My little Memoji head follows my mouse around the screen and if I start typing into that password box it will even look down to see what I’m doing. You better not get the password wrong because Memoji Jacob will not be happy if you do!

I need to change my partner’s picture as well to match her Memoji, but I think this is a really cool feature and it adds a little bit of fun and whimsy back into macOS – something that’s always been a big part of the Mac and now it’s there again on my Lock Screen. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video, if you have please do Subscribe down below. There are hundreds more videos for iPhone, iPad, and Mac waiting for you on my Channel so go and check it out, pick up some more #QuickTips, and I’ll see you next time!