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 too. We’ll show you how to dig up those beautiful wallpapers and use them as wallpaper for your OS X Mavericks 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 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:
/Library/Screen Savers/Default Collections/
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
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