Access 40+ Beautiful Wallpapers Hidden in OS X El Capitan & Mavericks
Some of you may recall that a series of beautiful new screen savers were introduced with the OS X Mountain Lion, and we here at OSXDaily showed you how to uncover the amazing images from those screen savers with a little bit of digging to use as your desktop wallpaper. It turns out you can still find these high-res pictures in OS X Mavericks, OS X Yosemite, and OS X El Capitan too. We’ll show you how to dig up those beautiful wallpapers and use them as wallpaper for your OS X Mac (or iOS device, Windows PC, Android, whatever you want to decorate).
Though the images are the same 43 awe-inspiring shots from earlier versions of OS X, Lifehacker noticed they have been relocated to a new location, which winds up making the beautiful wallpaper imagery more easily accessible to the average Mac user.
For the impatient, the hidden wallpapers are now stored at the following location:
/Library/Screen Savers/Default Collections/
You can access that directory immediately by hitting Command+Shift+G and pasting in the full path. You could copy all 43 images to a more convenient location if you’d like to readily access them, but we’ll show you a better way to access them directly from the Desktop preference panel, which prevents duplicate files from cluttering up the Mac.
Access the Hidden Wallpapers on Mac from Desktop Preferences
You may have noticed if you attempt to drag the entire “Desktop Collections” directory into the Desktop preference panel, the images don’t show up, that’s because /Library/ is a system directory with different privileges. Rather than make a copy of all the images to access them, you can simply drag & drop each individual folder into the Desktop preferences to add them to the Desktop preference panel instead:
- From any Finder window, hit Command+Shift+G and point to the following path:
- Pull down the Apple menu and open “System Preferences”, followed by “Desktop & Screen Saver”, and choose the Desktop panel
- Drag and drop each individual folder from “Default Collections” into the folders section found in the sidebar of the Desktop preference panel
- Enjoy your new beautiful, freshly visible wallpapers
/Library/Screen Savers/Default Collections/
You may need to drag and drop each folder independently rather than as a group to get each folder to add to the Preference panel.
There are a grand total of 43 hidden wallpapers broken into four descriptive categories; “National Geographic”, “Aerial”, “Cosmos”, and “Nature Patterns”, each set is absolutely beautiful, and all individual wallpapers are 3200×2000 resolution.
Hidden Mavericks Wallpaper Direct Links
Not on a Mac, but still want the wallpapers? If you don’t want to deal with copying them over to another computer or your iOS device, someone was kind enough to upload all the images into albums on Imgur:
Click through on any thumbnail to download the full resolution version. (The Nature Patterns look particularly good with iOS, by the way).
