How to make Wallpaper to cycling through all photos within an Album ?

Sonoma briefly made this worse, but I resolved it. What I like about Sonoma is that it now shows my photos the way I cropped them - ¡Yay! But it only cycled through the same three photos - even though I have 200+ photos in the file. This is how I fixed it. Go to Apple / System Settings / Wallpaper, and scroll down to the folder of photos that you are going to use, and then click "show all." Click on each individual photo in the folder - for me, this was 200+ photos - and you'll notice them each appear filling your desktop. Then, click on the first (composite) image in the folder with the circular "shuffle" arrows. Now, go to the top of the Wallpaper window and decide on your preferred frequency of suffling and if you want it to be random. I think what this process did was "initialize" each photo into the lineup. That's it! Good luck!

Yes, what I ended up doing was creating a folder called Wallpaper in my DropBox (you could also use iCloud), then subfolders in that which match the Albums in Photos that I wanted to use for wallpaper, and dragged the contents of each of the albums to one of those subfolders and set those up in the Wallpaper setting on each of my machines. Unfortunately I have to manually update those folders when I add new photos, but only once since they are synced. In other words, exactly what the Wallpaper setting SHOULD be doing.

I created a folder on my desktop, dragged my way-too-many photos into that folder, set it in Wallpaper, and it does rotate through all. Using a ridiculous amount of space on my computer for that. Hoping Apple fixes this soon!

nelsons-3 wrote:

On my Mac book, why does my wallpaper only rotate through a few photos instead of the whole album file like it used to.

It does it for all my photo albums, not just one. Rebooting the computer doesn't help.

It's not a question of orientation. All 4 or 5 photos are oriented properly.

macOS Ventura Support Community:

I thought this bug was resolved? You make no mention which Ventura you are running...

Can you verify your software is up to date…

The current stable release of Ventura including bug fixes, security updates is macOS Ventura 13.4

Keep your Mac up to date - Apple Support

Keep your Mac up to date - Apple Support

I found that even after rebooting to get the random rotate to work better it never did cycle through all of the photo album photos... probably related to caching and/or memory, I don't know.

What does work, however, is to export all of your photos to a single directory somewhere and then choose the "Add Folder" option instead of the "Add Photo Album".

Greetings, Yorkie444 -

I wrote a solution on this thread on 09/30/23. I'll add two more points to it:

1. Open the Photos app after a reboot (and then close it if you wish) before you use the method that I wrote about. You should then be able to see your folder of photos that you want to us.
2. You don't have to actually click on every photo to re-initialize it, but you do have to scroll through them in the settings window. There is a way to do this somewhat quickly. Click on the first photo of the next row, then scroll right three times, then click on the first photo of the next row, then scroll right three times...
3. And yes, with every re-boot, you have to go back through the same process.

So, yes, I'm still doing this... with over 200 photos... and it is -so- much better than Ventura!

Good luck!

Logging out then back in broke my solution for me with using a folder instead of a Photos Album, so that answered my question of whether it is a bug in Photos or a bug in the Wallpaper system -- it is obviously the latter. I tried the solution you proposed and it worked... for a while. But I have two monitors, each with six spaces, and sometimes the simple act of swiping back to a space will cause the wallpaper to revert to default, and then I have to go through the process again. And the albums/folders I'm using can have hundreds to thousands of photos, so I'm not going "initialize" each and every one of those, as it's just not practical when the system breaks as often as it does. I have not upgraded to Sonoma yet, but if the bug still exists there as you say, this is now three consecutive versions of Mac OS that have the bug. Unbelievably frustrating that Apple hasn't fixed it yet. I know we are probably edge cases and 95% of users don't even change the wallpaper from default, and don't have multiple monitors, and never use Spaces, but seriously if you are going to offer features with options like these you should make sure those options actually work consistently.

I tried this option several years back when I was having similar problems, at least with the orientation of the photos. However I have determined that the rotation doe not use the entire 11,XXX plus photos, but instead a finite number of the folder. I also feel that the rotation starts at the same point and seems to go through the pictures more or less in the same order, if technically random.

I used to enjoy watching my photos rotate through everything until I got my 27" iMac (was that back in '20 or'21?) I've even been on the phone with "support" but after struggling with it for several months I gave up trying. The people I dealt with were supportive and somewhat helpful, but the overall responses were all the same. "The developers are aware of the problem and are working on it." I saw a thread that was started in June or July of this years and the poster was complaining about exactly the same issues I've been having for years.

[Edited by Moderator]

same here ... rotates thru like 3 pics out of 5k ... i got ventura 14.3.1

Same problem with Ventura 13.4.1 (c). A recent update changed this from all photos in an album to only the last few. In my case, I over 700 in the album, but it rotates about 6 to 12..?

I updated to Ventura 13.5 and now the rotation does not work at all. I changed albums, changed time interval, turned Randomly off and on... Still stuck on first photo.

Exactly the same here - new M2 Mini, running Ventura 13.4 - the wallpaper only rotates though a handful of images even though I have over 8000 in my Photos library. If I choose a photo at random as my wallpaper it works fine for that photo, but any attempt to get it to show more than a handful of different ones fails.

Any solution?

No, it's not resolved. Fully updated to 13.5.1 on both my iMac Pro and my M1 MacBook Pro and Wallpaper still won't use more than the first 3 photos despite Auto-Rotate being selected.

[Edited by Moderator]