MacOS Catalina: dynamic wallpaper all of a sudden changes in white background

Hello Alex

Thanks for the suggestions. There is good news (which on the other hand is a bit "bad" as well as it doesn't give me a chance to try your first suggestion): After logging out and in again (after a couple of hours, which probably is important as this might have somehow "triggered" the dynamic background process to load another picture) the problem seem to have solved itself and up until now did not re-appear.

I already had tried your second suggestion (logging in as another user) when this problem popped up in the past, running Mojave ... this indeed proved that it had to do with my account as the dynamic desktop did work perfectly in that new account. Re-entering my own account resulted in the white background being loaded again.

Back then I decided to turn off the dynamic wallpaper and use a static one instead. As said, with Catalina all seemed OK up until this week.

If the problem pops up again I will try your first suggestion. If I'm not mistaken, starting in safe mode will also reset some settings and clear some caches, right? If this then solves the issue there is still no way to tell what exactly has caused the problem though. This is a pity as I really would like to know what was the root cause to this.

Again, thanks for your reaction (it doesn't seem to be a common problem as nobody else seems to have been hit by it).

Kind regards.

Some new information: After a while the problem "automatically" disappeared (I switched back from "Dark (Still)" to "Dynamic" again and noticed all was OK (and it stayed that way for the remainder of the evening as well as this morning).

Now that I just came back from work and woke the iMac again, I notice that the background (still on "Dynamic") is white again!!

Could it be that the set of wallpapers which more or less define this "Dynamic" wallpaper is corrupted? Could it be that one of the bitmaps (representing a certain daytime section) is messed up? I do not have any insight in how this Dynamic wallpaper is set up, maybe some expert on this matter can kick in here and explain.

In the meantime I will check whether my theory holds:

• without doing anything check whether the "white background" will be swapped with a correct "Catalina" wallpaper (the next one in the sequence) tonight
• check whether tomorrow the white background will appear again at app. the same time

An update:

I think my theory indeed holds:

• Noticed that (without doing anything) the white background automatically got replaced with a "normal" Catalina Island screenshot at a certain moment in time
• I just (at 16:48 GMT+1 to be exactly) noticed that white background popping up again ... all of a sudden!!

It seems that one of the bitmaps in the Dynamic Catalina Island sequence is corrupted .... for me alone (as all is OK when my wife logs in into her own account).

Now I'm reaching out to the experts around here: Is it true that each separate user on a macOS machine will have a local copy of the Dynamic wallpaper stored somewhere in his/her account? If so, where can I find this?

Furthermore: Any explanation on how I ended up with a corrupted sequence (at least one of the bitmaps seems to be corrupted or simply non-existent)?

KR,

And there it happened again! After having had no problems at all with the (dynamic) wallpaper for weeks (since I reported this problem in this forum), today all of a sudden it happened again:

Just unlocked my iMac after getting home to notice that the background was all white again (in fact I already noticed it at the "lock screen": the washed out background was already white).

One additional remark: It remains white when switching from "Catalina Dynamic" to "Catalina White (Still)". Only when switching to "Catalina Dark (Still)" I get a normal (dark) Catalina background again. This is "reversible" for now: When switching back to Dynamic or White again, the desktop background turns completely white again. Swithing to "Mojave Dynamic" however works correctly!

Very strange problem ... even more strange that dacolson and I seem to be the only one experiencing this.

I’m “glad” that I am not the only one ..... seems that not many people are hit by this problem though.

Still have no real solution to this. Very annoying.

No I don’t. I have an iMac (model 2013, 27” with fusion drive, for what it matters). No external monitor connected.