macOS Aerial Wallpapers Taking Up Space? Remove Them

The animated aerials in macOS Sonoma and Sequoia are slow, gorgeous drone shots — and every one you use is a full 4K video downloaded to your Mac. Pick a few favourites and a shuffle set, and several gigabytes quietly disappear into System Data. Here's how to see what they're costing you and remove the ones you don't need.

Why aerial wallpapers take so much space

Each aerial is a long, high-resolution video file stored locally so it can loop smoothly on your desktop and as a screen saver. A single aerial typically weighs a few hundred megabytes to around a gigabyte, and the wallpaper and screen saver versions come from the same download. You don't get them all by default — each one downloads the first time you select it, including every member of a shuffle set, which is why the damage scales with curiosity.

Because the files are system-managed, they don't appear as an app or media category in System Settings → General → Storage. They're counted inside System Data — a big part of why that bucket balloons after you start playing with aerials.

Aerials arrived with macOS 14 Sonoma and carried into Sequoia. macOS 13 Ventura doesn't have them, so if you're on Ventura, this isn't where your space went.

Check how much space they're using

# total size of downloaded aerial videos (read-only)
du -sh "/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer"

That's where macOS keeps the videos. If it reads a few hundred megabytes, leave it alone — this is only worth cleaning when the number is in gigabytes. And resist the urge to delete files there by hand: the idleassetsd process owns that folder and will simply re-download any aerial that's still selected somewhere. The durable fix lives in System Settings.

Delete the aerials you don't need

1. Open System Settings → Wallpaper.
2. If an aerial is your current wallpaper, switch to a static image or a colour first — you can't remove the one that's in use.
3. Scroll through the aerial sections (Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater, Earth). Thumbnails without a download badge are already on your disk.
4. Move the pointer over a downloaded aerial and click the remove control that appears on its thumbnail, then confirm. The video file is deleted immediately.
5. Repeat the sweep in System Settings → Screen Saver — it lists the same aerials, and a screen-saver selection keeps a download alive just as a wallpaper one does.

Thumbnails that still show a download arrow aren't on your disk and cost nothing to leave alone — browsing the gallery is free; selecting is what triggers the download. The badge is also your tell during cleanup: no arrow means the video is already sitting on your drive.

Stop them from coming back

• Watch out for Shuffle Aerials. Selecting a big shuffle set like All Aerials queues up every video in the rotation — the single fastest way to burn 5–10 GB. Shuffle a handful you actually like instead.
• Deleted aerials reappearing? The aerial is still selected as wallpaper or screen saver somewhere — possibly on another desktop space or a second display. Deselect it everywhere, then remove the download again.
• On a small SSD, go static. A still frame of the same scenery as your wallpaper costs a few megabytes instead of a gigabyte, and macOS ships plenty of static options in the same Wallpaper pane.

System Data still looks huge?

Aerials are only one tenant of that category. Caches, old iOS backups, Time Machine snapshots, and logs all live there too — our guide to System Data storage on Mac walks through the rest.