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How to remove downloaded aerial screensavers and moving wallpapers on macOS Sonoma

In the latest version of MacOS 14.0 Sonoma, Apple introduced breath-taking aerial dynamic wallpapers and screen savers. They are very nice indeed but may take a lot of space on your disk- especially if you want to view them all before selecting the favourite one.

Unfortunately, Apple has not provided a functionality (yet?) to delete those we don’t want to be stored in our system.

Here are a few steps you can do to delete those downloaded but not needed:

  1. Open Finder application and go to the following directory:
    • Choose the disk your system is installed onto (usually: Macintosh HD) -> Library -> Application Support -> com.apple.idleassetsd -> Customer

    • 
or simply open a "Go to Folder" window by pressing Command ⌘ + Shift ⇧ + G simultaneously

    • copy/paste the following path:
      
/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/
    • and then hit ENTER to open the location
  2. Depending on the screen you use, the downloaded dynamic wallpapers/screen savers are storred in one of the following directories (on my MacBook Pro the directory name is "4KSDR240FPS" and currently shows 3 items).

  3. As their names are not clear, you can open each of the files to ensure you are deleting the correct one. Of course you can delete all of them and they will be downloaded the next time you chose the wallpaper again.
  4. On deletion, the system will ask you to provide the user/password that has required permissions to delete the files.
    * It’s worth to note that you will not be able to delete the file representing currently used wallpaper/screensaver. Change it to another one before deletion and the file will be unlocked for removal.

Document version: 1.1

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