If you've found your Mac's lock screen boring until now, you must have been delighted to hear last June that macOS Sonoma lets you set impressive moving wallpapers. While for seasoned owners of Apple computers, installing a moving wallpaper is no doubt a piece of cake, beginners can fumble a little - and that's what our guide for today is intended for.
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"macOS Sonoma has amazing new screensavers that show beautiful slow-motion videos of locations around the world," stated during the presentation of the new version of the operating system last June Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at the company Apple.
Custom screensavers liven up your lock screen and allow you to customize them in more detail than before. Originally, the lock screen consisted of a main image representing the version of macOS you are using, but now you can change it to one of the screensavers on offer.
If you want to add more personality to your Mac's lock screen and desktop, then screensavers are a great way to do it.
How to Set Moving Screensavers on Mac
Selecting a screen saver is the same as selecting a wallpaper. Animated screensavers are labeled so you can distinguish them from regular desktop wallpapers. Here's how to find and use a screen saver.
- On your Mac, run System Settings.
- In the left panel of the settings window, click on Wallpaper.
- Find the wallpaper preview with the play icon on it - this icon is the "live" wallpaper / screen saver.
- Now you only need to click to select the desired theme.
Gallery
You can also set whether your chosen theme will be only on the desktop or on the lock screen. You can choose from a lot of motifs with nature and urban scenery.
The saver is downloaded first, and if there are more than one, they take up quite a bit of disk space as system data. But I haven't figured out how to delete them again.
This is not very easy (I don't understand why). Live wallpapers are MOV files. They are hidden in /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer. Type “How to delete a live wallpaper in MacOS” into the search engine. Simply throw the relevant MOV into the trash and restart MacOS. I just tried x wallpapers when MacOS Sonoma was released and nestI started to wonder what had taken so long, so I decided to get rid of it (classic wallpapers and default ones are stored elsewhere – probably to confuse the enemy :-)).