macOS 27 hides a solar scheduler for the Landscape wallpapers — here's how to turn it on

macOS 27 Golden Gate contains a solar scheduler that groups the four variants of a Landscape aerial under one entry and picks the right one from the sun's position. Apple enabled it by default in beta 6 but hasn't shipped the matching wallpaper registry, so the Automatic option is still hidden.

Updated 2026-09-10 · 8 min read

Three different things macOS calls a dynamic wallpaper

Three unrelated mechanisms end up filed under the same phrase, which is why most of what circulates about macOS 27 is wrong before it even starts.

Dynamic Wallpapers are the oldest of the three. Apple's wallpaper guide describes them in one line: “These images brighten and darken, based on the time of day for your current location.” One HEIC file, several baked exposures, nothing in motion — the desktop has behaved that way since Mojave.

Aerials are the ones routinely mistaken for live wallpapers. Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater and Earth are video clips, and Apple is just as precise about when they run: “These aerial images animate as you lock or unlock your Mac, showing dramatic views. By default, the aerial wallpaper you select is also used as your screen saver.”

The third thing is what macOS 27 adds. A solar scheduler sits on top of the Aerials: it collapses the four variants of one landscape into a single entry in System Settings, then decides which variant is current from the position of the sun. In macOS 26 that logic existed as an internal WallpaperExtensionCore.SolarTrigger; for macOS 27, according to mactracker in the MacRumors thread, Apple “moved and expanded that machinery into a new centralized WallpaperExtensionKit.SolarTrigger”.

Why the Automatic option doesn't appear on your Mac

Because nothing is locked. This is what every copy-pasted tutorial gets backwards: the mechanism is already running, and what Apple has not delivered is the data it feeds on.

mactracker, who pulled the feature apart in the MacRumors thread on 18 August 2026, puts it flatly: “The only reason you're not seeing the Automatic display option is that Apple hasn't shipped a compatible wallpaper registry with solar coordinates for the Golden Gate and Tahoe wallpapers.” On how finished the work is, same post: “They have removed the private feature flag, so the feature is quite mature.” And on what remains: “All it takes now is for Apple to push a new wallpaper registry under https://configuration.apple.com/configurations/internetservices/aerials/resources-config-27-0.plist with solar coordinates.”

pdfux's gist, written against the same builds, describes the hole from the other end: beta 6 ships a registry holding four separate Tahoe and Golden Gate wallpapers, and “neither collection has combineVariants or variant.solar metadata in the registry, so you won't see the Automatic option”.

So the procedure further down unlocks nothing and patches nothing. It hands macOS 27 the catalogue Apple has not published yet. Two things follow. The private feature flag people still pass around is now pointless — more on that below. And the day Apple pushes that registry, everything on this page becomes unnecessary, which is the expected outcome at GM.

What the procedure needs — and what it doesn't

The numbered procedure at the bottom of this page reproduces what pdfux documented and what the MacRumors thread discusses, tested there on two builds: 26A5416b (developer beta 6 / public beta 4, released 17 August 2026) and 26A5421a (developer beta 7 / public beta 5, released 24 August 2026). No Mac running macOS 27 was available here, so nothing below is offered as a first-hand test — it is attributed reporting of two sources that agree. A detail that trips people up when they check their own build: the prefix is still 26A while the marketing version is 27, the same one-step offset that made macOS 26 Tahoe ship as 25A builds, and the kernel reports Darwin Kernel Version 27.0.0.

What the procedure does not require is worth stating, because it is unusual for this kind of tweak: no sudo, no restart, and no disabling SIP. It reads one file inside /System — read-only access, which macOS allows — and otherwise writes only into your own ~/Library and your own user defaults domain. Three commands undo all of it.

The pre-release caveats are real, though. This is beta software: don't do it on the machine you work on, take a Time Machine backup first, and expect the next beta to rewrite entries.json and quietly undo everything. One more consequence follows directly from the mechanism described above: while AerialManifestForceLocal is set, the catalogue is pinned to your local file, so any wallpaper Apple later pushes through resources-config-27-0.plist will not reach you until you remove the override.

What altitude and azimuth are worth, and when the wallpaper really flips

Two numbers per variant, and the gist defines them without ambiguity: “altitude: how high the Sun is above or below the horizon” and “azimuth: the Sun's compass direction, where 180° means south”. From there, macOS “calculates the Sun's current coordinates using your location, date, and time” and “selects whichever wallpaper variant is closest to the Sun's current position”. Altitude separates day from night; azimuth acts as an east/west barrier, which is what stops a morning variant from winning in the evening at the same sun height. The values themselves are Apple's, recovered from an earlier macOS 27 beta variant catalogue — not numbers someone made up.

Four switches per 24 hours, then, drifting a little each day with the sun. Those four times are specific to that latitude and that date; run the same setup further north and the night slot grows at the expense of the morning one.

Two quirks to expect. GG_A_SUNSET is deliberately used for the morning position, because Golden Gate ships no separately named Morning video — the gist says so explicitly. And the whole calculation depends on your location, so with Location Services off macOS falls back on a point representative of your time zone, the same behaviour documented by the third-party aerial-dynamic-wallpaper project. The gist also warns that the time of day at which you select the wallpaper may affect the transitions on the first day.

The TahoeCombined flag no longer works: what to remove

Before beta 6, the same result went through a private feature flag, with sudo and a restart:

• sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain
• sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/Wallpaper TahoeCombined -dict Enabled -bool true

That flag also targeted a different catalogue file — entries_variants.json, not the entries.json used today. If you copied those two lines from a page written in July or early August and nothing happened, that is the reason: pdfux's updated gist states that “the TahoeCombined feature flag is no longer needed nor functional”, precisely because Apple removed the private flag and turned the behaviour on by default.

Clear it out before doing anything else, so you are not debugging two mechanisms at once:

• sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/Wallpaper TahoeCombined

The honest limit: it schedules videos, it doesn't animate your desktop

Half a truth circulates in each direction, so here are both halves. Yes, these really are videos. The asset IDs read GG_A_*, where the A stands for Aerial, and the files are .mov. MacRumors, covering the beta 6 additions on 17 August 2026, notes that Golden Gate Day and Golden Gate Evening “animate when you unlock your Mac, and can be set as a screen saver”, and that as a screen saver both “feature cars slowly driving across the bridge”. The thread agrees: the media remain separate videos, and the scheduler selects the closest matching one. Playing them is the job of a separate process, the same one behind what WallpaperVideoExtension does to your CPU.

And no, they do not run on your desktop. Apple's own sentence is the ceiling here: aerials “animate as you lock or unlock your Mac”. Between two unlocks, the desktop shows the corresponding still frame and nothing else moves.

Put the two halves together and the solar mechanism is exactly what its class name says: a trigger. It decides which of the four videos plays at the next lock or unlock. That buys you four distinct moods a day on a desktop that is otherwise motionless — a genuine improvement, and not at all the thing people are after when they ask why a Mac desktop doesn't keep moving like an iPhone Lock Screen.

If you want a desktop that really moves — or you're on an Intel Mac

Start with the hard constraint, because it closes the question for a lot of readers: macOS 27 Golden Gate drops Intel altogether. MacRumors' roundup is blunt — “macOS Tahoe is the last version of macOS that will run on Intel-based Macs” — and the compatibility list is Apple Silicon only: MacBook Neo (2026), MacBook Air and MacBook Pro from 2020, iMac from 2021, Mac mini from 2020, Mac Studio from 2022, Mac Pro from 2023. A 2019 iMac will never show the Automatic option, no matter what anyone edits in a catalogue file.

On macOS 26 there is a third-party route to something adjacent: the BiAksoy/aerial-dynamic-wallpaper project extracts frames from the Aerial .mov files and builds a classic solar HEIC out of them. It is not the macOS 27 scheduler, and it produces no motion — it produces a still image that shifts with the hour.

If what you actually want is a background that keeps drawing while you work, that is a different category of software, and it is worth reading through the free animated wallpaper options on macOS before paying for anything. Mac+ renders its scenes live on the GPU with Metal rather than decoding a clip, runs on macOS 13 and later, on both Intel and Apple Silicon, and is free to use, with €1.99/month or €9.99 one-time to unlock everything (prices as of 28 August 2026). Its limit deserves to be said out loud: those scenes are procedural, not Apple's photographed landscapes. It does not replace Golden Gate — it answers a different question.

Enable the Automatic option on macOS 27 beta 6 or 7

1. Check your build under Apple menu > About This Mac. The procedure is only documented on 26A5416b (developer beta 6 / public beta 4) and 26A5421a (developer beta 7 / public beta 5). Take a Time Machine backup first, and don't do this on a machine you depend on.
2. Create the local catalogue folder: mkdir -p "$HOME/Library/Application Support/com.apple.wallpaper/aerials/custom"
3. Copy Apple's catalogue into it: cp /System/Library/ExtensionKit/Extensions/WallpaperAerialsExtension.appex/Contents/Resources/entries.json ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.wallpaper/aerials/custom/
4. Add the missing metadata with plutil: set combineVariants to true on subcategories 0DC99DD8-3386-4D1E-8878-C43E97EB710A (Tahoe) and 67512508-D33E-4CBC-8A9E-BE55CEE35C4C (Golden Gate), then write variant = {"solar":{"altitude":A,"azimuth":Z}} on the eight assets TA_L_001, TA_L_002, TA_D_001, TA_D_002, GG_A_SUNSET, GG_A_DAY, GG_A_EVENING and GG_A_NIGHT, using the values from the table above. The shell helpers that automate the walk (find_id_index, find_asset_index, enable_combining, set_solar_variant) are in pdfux's gist — copy them from there rather than from a retyped version, they are too long to reproduce here.
5. Validate the file before going further: plutil -convert json -o /dev/null "$CATALOG". If it returns an error, stop and fix the JSON.
6. Point the extension at your catalogue: defaults write com.apple.wallpaper.aerial AerialManifestLocalPathOverride -string "$CATALOG" then defaults write com.apple.wallpaper.aerial AerialManifestForceLocal -bool true
7. Restart the agent: killall WallpaperAgent WallpaperAerialsExtension 2>/dev/null || true
8. Check in System Settings > Wallpaper > Landscape: Tahoe and Golden Gate should each appear as a single thumbnail, with an Automatic option (likely rendered as Automatique, Automático or Automatisch in a localised build — only the English label is attested).
9. To revert everything: defaults delete com.apple.wallpaper.aerial AerialManifestLocalPathOverride, then defaults delete com.apple.wallpaper.aerial AerialManifestForceLocal, then rm -rf -- "$HOME/Library/Application Support/com.apple.wallpaper/aerials/custom", then the killall from step 7.

macOS 13 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon — including the Macs macOS 27 leaves behind. Free tier, no account required.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

Sources

• MacRumors Forums — mactracker's thread on the solar switching of the macOS 27 Landscape wallpapers (2–21 August 2026)
• pdfux — Enable the dynamic Tahoe and Golden Gate landscape wallpapers (Beta 6-7), GitHub Gist
• Apple Support — Customize the wallpaper on your Mac
• MacRumors — Apple Adds More New Wallpapers in macOS Golden Gate (17 August 2026)
• MacRumors — macOS Golden Gate: Everything We Know

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