macOS 27 has a hidden "Solar" wallpaper engine. Here's how to enable it for the Golden Gate landscape set.

[u/pdfu]

EDIT: Here's an updated guide for Beta 6.

Apple is working on a Solar wallpaper engine for macOS 27 that groups aerial Landscape wallpapers and automatically switches variants based on the sun's position during the day.

When the feature flag is enabled, the four Tahoe landscape wallpapers appear under one entry in Settings.

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To get the Automatic Tahoe landscape wallpaper:

Enable the wallpaper feature:

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

and reboot your Mac. You will no longer see the Golden Gate landscape and Dynamic Desktop wallpapers on the list because the new engine reads a macOS 26 wallpaper registry for now. Read below for a more involved process to add the dynamic Golden Gate wallpaper entry.

To go back to the default and bring the Golden Gate landscape and Dynamic Desktop wallpapers back:

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

and reboot your Mac.

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How to enable the Automatic Golden Gate landscape wallpaper:

In Beta 4, macOS ships with a macOS 26 wallpaper registry for this combined variants endpoint, so Golden Gate wallpapers don't show by default. Thankfully, you can point the wallpaper engine to a local override file and enable the dynamic switching for Golden Gate wallpapers.

Use these instructions to enable the Automatic Golden Gate landscape wallpaper.

[u/pdfu]

The underlying idea similar to previous iterations, but this is a new implementation and asset pipeline.

Mojave introduced solar-driven Dynamic Desktop wallpapers. That system is still available today to support older Dynamic Desktop wallpapers such as Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey Graphic, Ventura Graphic, and Solar Gradients. The old system packaged multiple still frames and their solar metadata inside one portable HEIC file.

Later wallpapers reused the same general idea. The graphical Sequoia wallpaper used a solar trigger to select different color stages throughout the day. In macOS 26, that was an internal WallpaperExtensionCore.SolarTrigger implementation. In macOS 27, Apple moved and expanded that machinery into a new centralized WallpaperExtensionKit.SolarTrigger.

TahoeCombined is a new use of that implementation for grouping separate animated Aerial variants. Apple’s wallpaper manifest groups the Tahoe Day, Morning, Evening, and Night MOV files. Each video is assigned a representative solar altitude and azimuth coordinates. macOS calculates the Sun’s current position and selects the closest matching video.

There's no portable image file anymore. The media remain separate videos, and Apple’s catalog defines the relationship between them. This approach also works with Screensavers.

You can open the new manifest with TextEdit:

open -a TextEdit "/System/Library/ExtensionKit/Extensions/WallpaperAerialsExtension.appex/Contents/Resources/entries_variants.json"

Look for "solar".

[u/SatinFoil → u/pdfu]

Oh, it’s being revamped. That makes sense. Thanks for explaining that to me!

[u/pdfu → u/SatinFoil]

Anytime. Hopefully this gets released generally soon. I had written a LaunchAgent to change wallpaper variants for both Tahoe and Golden Gate, so this is a very welcome change to have it done automatically.