With the current pandemic enforced usage of Teams over chatting at the water machine I wanted a way to hide the background.

My wife’s a nurse, so the home ‘office’ is hers for patient confidentiality atm, which means I’m nomading around the house. This means my background varies a lot, so having something different than an untidy shelf of books, the kitchen counter or a blinding window glare behind me would be nice

There’s plenty of windows hints on having a custom Teams background on Windows, but not so much about having them on a Mac. With a bit of digging it turn out that if you want a custom Teams background on your Mac it’s quite simple after all.

All you need to do is to drop a file into:

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Teams/Backgrounds/Uploads

If you’re not used to *nix paths, the ~ translates to your home directory. So for me on my Macbook Pro with the username stuart, that ends up being

/Users/stuart/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Teams/Backgrounds/Uploads

Just drop the images you want Teams to use as a custom background into that folder and they’ll show up in the gallery.

It seems Teams isn’t picky about which file format you use for a custom background. I’ve tried png, jpeg and gif, and they all work fine. Unfortunately animated gifs don’t work, which is both a good and a bad thing depending on your personal love of gifs