Since macOS Sonoma you can use moving backgrounds, also called live wallpapers. These can be compared to the bird’s eye view screensavers for Apple TV.
These wallpapers show you the most beautiful places in the world and move in slow motion when the lock screen is active. As soon as you log in, they will return as wallpaper on your desktop. To use these wallpapers you must first download them to your Mac. If you want to free up storage space, you can manually delete the backgrounds that you are not using.
Set live wallpapers
- Open  ▸ System Settings
- Navigate to ‘Wallpaper’
The new moving backgrounds can be found in the categories: landscape, cityscape, underwater and earth. You can then select one background here. Do you want this to change automatically? Then choose a desired collection from ‘Shuffle at a glance’. Then you can shuffle between all new wallpapers, or all screensavers per category.
Wallpapers that are not yet on your Mac have a down arrow next to the description of the ‘wallpaper’. If this arrow is not there, you have already downloaded the background.
Remove moving backgrounds
Strangely enough, you can start the download from System Settings, but you can’t delete the wallpaper download. To do this, you must manually look for the files on your Mac, follow the steps below.
- Open Finder
- Navigate to ‘Go’ in the menu bar
- Choose ‘Go to folder’
- Enter the following path: /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer
- Press enter to open the folder
You will then get an overview of all saved backgrounds in the relevant folders. Depending on the specifications of your Mac, you will find the wallpapers in the corresponding folder. For example, on a 24-inch iMac you will find them at ‘4KSDR240FPS’ and on a 16-inch MacBook Pro at ‘4KHDR’.
You will then see an overview of all files with the mov format. Select the backgrounds you want to remove and drag them to the trash or click with a secondary click (right mouse button) on the file and choose ‘move to trash’.
Repeat this for all files you want to delete to free up storage space. Moreover, it is worthwhile to delete unused backgrounds in this way, because on average they are 650 MB in size each.
Automatic cleanup
Apple has not built a delete button into system settings because unused wallpapers are automatically cleared when your Mac’s storage space is about to become full. Thanks to the steps above, you can do this earlier and decide for yourself when the space is freed up.