How to Use the Aerial Screen Savers as Mac Wallpaper

macOS Sonoma brought the Apple TV's drone footage to the Mac — and wired it into the desktop. Pick an aerial and it plays as your screen saver, then glides to a stop and becomes your wallpaper when you log in. One continuous scene, no third-party apps. Here's the setup and the storage bill.

Set an aerial as wallpaper

1. Open System Settings → Wallpaper (macOS 14 Sonoma or later — Ventura doesn't have aerials).
2. Scroll to the aerial categories: Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater, and Earth.
3. Click one. macOS downloads the video in the background (watch for the progress spinner on the thumbnail) and sets it once it lands.
4. Leave Show as screen saver enabled to get the matched pair — wallpaper and screen saver as one scene.

You can start from the other end, too: pick the same aerial under System Settings → Screen Saver and enable its Show as wallpaper option. Either way you get the pairing, and either pane can break it later if you'd rather mix a video screen saver with a still wallpaper.

The blend trick: why it feels seamless

Here's the choreography. As wallpaper, the aerial is a freeze-frame — a still from the flight. When the screen saver kicks in, the footage starts moving from that exact frame, slow drone drift over Yosemite or Hong Kong. Unlock or come back, and instead of a hard cut the video eases to a stop and that final frame becomes your new wallpaper still. The desktop you return to is wherever the flight ended. It's the single most polished visual in modern macOS, and it happens automatically once wallpaper and screen saver point at the same aerial.

A shuffle option (choose Shuffle Aerials in the screen saver settings) rotates through the whole collection, or just your favourites, instead of replaying one flight.

The storage bill

Each aerial is high-resolution video, and they add up:

• Files typically run several hundred megabytes each; a handful of favourites can pass 2–3 GB, and shuffling the full collection several times that.
• They download on demand to /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer — system-managed territory; don't hand-delete files there.
• To reclaim space, deselect aerials you no longer use, or see our aerial wallpaper storage guide for auditing what's been downloaded.

Battery and performance

As wallpaper, an aerial costs nothing — it's a static frame. The video only plays while the screen saver runs, which on battery is time the display would better spend asleep. Practical setup: keep the aerial pairing, but set Lock Screen settings so the screen saver starts on power while the display simply sleeps on battery. Slow-motion scenery on the desk, no drone flights taxing the battery in your bag.

Displays, Spaces, and the shuffle

On a multi-monitor Mac each display shows its own aerial — the screen saver flies a different route on each screen, and each settles into its own freeze-frame wallpaper. Wallpaper also stays per-Space, so an aerial on Desktop 1 coexists happily with a plain photo on Desktop 2; the pairing follows whichever Space you set it on.

If you shuffle, be deliberate about the pool: the screen saver settings let you limit shuffling to categories or hand-picked favourites rather than the whole catalogue. Every aerial in the pool eventually downloads — which is how people end up donating 10 GB to drone footage they've seen twice. A shortlist of five or six keeps both the variety and the disk in check, and picking new aerials while on Wi-Fi spares a metered connection the bulk download.

One timing note: the flights only run while the screen saver does, so give them room — in Lock Screen settings, start the screen saver after a short idle and let the display sleep several minutes later. The Mac spends its idle time as scenery rather than a black rectangle. (On battery, reverse the priorities and let the display sleep first.)