Where are screensavers stored in Mac OS X?
In order to remove individual screensavers from the Mac OS X operating system, it may sometimes be necessary to manually delete them from the folder in which they were stored. When you are unable to uninstall a screensaver via the Screen Savers panel, for example. Before you can do this, you need to know exactly where the screensaver file is located.
When installing a screensaver, you are often presented with the choice to install it just for yourself, or for all user accounts on the computer. This determines where the actual screensaver file is stored on your hard drive:
- If you chose to install it only for your own user account, you should be able to find the screensaver file in the folder "/Users/USERNAME/Library/Screen Savers". In this path, "USERNAME" is the username of your account.
- If the screensaver you are looking for is not located in the above folder, or you (or another user) had chosen to install it for all users, then you need to open the folder with the path "/Library/Screen Savers".
- Finally, there is another "Screen Savers" folder that only contains the screensavers that came with your installation of Mac OS X by default. These are located at "/System/Library/Screen Savers".
If you have the permissions to enter these folders, you should be able to browse to them using the Finder. Note that, by default, the Finder begins in the current user's home folder. To access the system folders, you first need to click on your hard drive, at the top left under "Devices". To remove any of the included screensavers, simply drag them to the Trash.
If you attempt to access these folders using the Terminal, please make sure you use single or double quotation marks around the path. Otherwise, the space in the name of the "Screen Savers" folder will break the command. For example, use the command "cd '/System/Library/Screen Savers'" rather than "cd /System/Library/Screen Savers".
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