Wallpaper not cycling through photos randomly

I found my way to solve this.

1. There is a perfect open source software "osxphotos": https://rhettbull.github.io/osxphotos/index.html
2. I use this to export all of my photos tagged with "bg" from the Photos app to a file system folder "bg.osxphotos"
3. This happens automatically via crontab on a daily basis
4. In system preferences I use "bg.osxphotos" as the source of my random wallpaper photos
5. Since there's no caching issue with file system folders (instead of Photos app) this works perfectly

crontab entry

50 9 * * * /usr/local/bin/photos-to-bg 

script /usr/local/bin/photos-to-bg

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /Users/xxx/Pictures/bg.osxphotos/*
/Users/xxx/.local/bin/osxphotos export /Users/xxx/Pictures/bg.osxphotos --skip-original-if-edited --update --keyword "bg" 2>&1

I made an album of my chosen photos, labeled it Wallpaper and added that album to my wallpaper choices. I chose Fit to Screen, Shuffle every 5 seconds Randomly. When I clicked on the album, I clicked on show all, and I manually clicked on EVERY photo in the album. Now, finally each photo is displayed randomly every 5 seconds. It's a pain if you have a lot of photos in the album, but at least the method works.

I've spent way longer footering about with this than I want, or should have had, to.

In the end I found that setting the wallpaper to (grits teeth) each individual photo in my library one at a time*, then selecting All photos, seemed to work. So I guess there is some caching thing at play here – unless the hi-res images are available locally, they can't be used as wallpaper.

*Not quite as painful as it sounds; you can cycle through all your photos quite quickly using the arrow keys. It only takes a second for each one to load if you have a halfway decent internet connection. Assuming you don't have like 50,000 photos, which I guess will be the case for some.

this worked for me. you have to "download" the pics by scrolling thru all the pics.

Same here with macOS Ventura 13.6. It will show a few of the newest photos only.

Just found out a solution that worked for me:

• I forced it to show the first photo in the album by scrolling to the rightmost photo in the album overview
• I switched back to the automatic cycling and it now shows all photos
• It has to be set vor every connected display individually

Cheers,

Christian

I have had some success getting the wallpaper to work.... I click on SHOW ALL then click the first photo then scroll down to the last photo and click it - then go back to the first photo and select auto rotate. This seems to get it to cycle through ALL of the photos in the album.... even albums with 1500 photos.

sure. The images in the wallpaper menu are handled different than in Photos app. The best workaround for me so far is to export the complete folder which you want as a wallpaper and add it as a wallpaper source. that works for me.

After years of working, a few years ago this stopped working on all my Macs except a 2017 iMac which is not being updated past Ventura. My kludgy work around is I have exported all photos - all 30,000 of them - from the Apple Photo Library to an external drive. I then set that drive as the wallpaper source. This works ... for me. However, Activity Monitor tells me that this "legacy" wallpaper is using almost 8 GB of physical memory! (I have 18 GB on the new MacBook Pro M3.) And this causes a swap file to be created, and memory pressure to go up a bit, but still within the green zone for what I do, which isn't much. I also have to manually update the exported file any time there are new photos in the iCloud connected actual photo library. Not happy. I can either get more RAM or go back to the supplied wallpapers which do not even show up as taking memory in Activity Monitor and certainly not almost 8GB.

Same here with macOS Ventura 13.6. It will show a few of the newest photos only.

Just found out a solution that worked for me:

• I forced it to show the first photo in the album by scrolling to the rightmost photo in the overview of the album
• I switched back to the automatic cycling and it now shows all photos
• It has to be set vor every connected display individually

Cheers,

Christian

Although that worked for me somewhat in the past, I've had no luck with it lately. Here is what *does* work: Export all photos to a file - you can use an external drive if you are limited on internal storage. Set that file as your wallpaper source, rotating every whatever time and either randomly or in sequence - your choices.

For a screen saver, I use Art Saver. Check it out at http://artsaver.de/index.html

I have way too much invested in my photography to settle for some generic wallpaper and screen saver. Apple's pictures are pretty but have zero relevance to me. Good luck.

Thank you,

After reading a lot of posts and trying many of the mentioned solutions, this one worked for me.

Sonoma version 14.1.2

Mark_the_great wrote:

I have it selected to rotate every day but even changing it to all of the different options (5 seconds, when waking from sleep, etc) it doesn't work.

Mac Studio, Ventura 13.5.1, Apple M2 Ultra,

To be proactive you can file a bug report /submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

I have tried Brianinpa's suggestion (my favorite album has 2,700 photos in it), and this method does not work for me (2023 MacBook Pro M2) Sonoma 14.6).

It doesn't matter if I click on the first photo, then the last, then back to the top and click on the "rotate" icon. Or click on first, click on last, click on first again, and then click on "rotate". Neither works. If I pick a different album (one with 875 photos), the first last method just ends up toggling between two photos, not all the ones in between.

I have a lame workaround, but it's too time-consuming to re-apply every few weeks when the solution breaks. Pick the first photo in the album, then #2, then 3#, etc., until you've toggled through all 500 or 2000 of them. Then click "rotate," and the wallpaper will indeed rotate through all the photos you've touched. Then do this all over again for desktop two and desktop three.

I just upgraded to Sonoma 14.1.2 from Ventura and the cycling through a Photos album is broken again. My album contains 359 photos.

If you select the cycling of an album right away it will not show any photos in the album, just the default background.

If you click on individual photos within the album it will show these photos.

If you then click on cycling again, it will show photos you have clicked on before only, independent of choosing random order or not.

The trick clicking on the last photo in the album does not work here as before in Ventura.

I tried to delete and add the same album again in Wallpaper but that did not help either.