Wallpaper not cycling through photos randomly

I am trying to have Wallpaper (through System Settings) rotate through pictures in my photos album as my desktop background.

I have selected and added an album from the Wallpaper setting of system settings via "Add Photo Album" from the pulldown menu at the bottom.

It will display 1 picture on the desktop but when I click on Random (to cycle pictures) it reverts to the generic Mac background.

I have tried running through 'All Pictures', different Albums, individual (smaller albums), and nothing seems to work.

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.


In addition, if I have it rotate through pictures not randomly (without checking the box) it only cycles through 2 pictures.


The photos file is located on an External drive with 3.5 TB available. It is loaded as the default photos album in Photos and doesn't show any delay when observing photos from the app.

The Photos file is too large to put on the main HD which is why it goes through the external HD.

I have run disk first aid on both volumes, checked the "Profiles" (there are none), tried restarting, and probably a few other things.


Mac Studio, Ventura 13.5.1, Apple M2 Ultra, 128GB Memory, 1TB HD space (with 511 GB available)

Apple Studio Display and a single monitor, connected via the thunderbolt cord (that was supplied with the monitor).

Thanks for your help,

Mark

Mac Studio, macOS 13.5

Posted on Sep 6, 2023 9:57 AM

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Posted on Sep 19, 2023 5:02 AM

I have the same issue.... not expecting Apple to fix it... I am really close to just ditching ALL apple products. They seem to be good at breaking stuff that worked for years when "enhancing" new OS.....and the new features are not useful to everyone. My external computer speaker no longer will play music from the iMac via bluetooth ( like that for at least a year!, and my car bluetooth just started to do that also.

If Apple cannot get their devices to synch properly with Bluetooth WTF are they doing when they Beta test????

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Sep 19, 2023 5:02 AM in response to Peter dErrico

I have the same issue.... not expecting Apple to fix it... I am really close to just ditching ALL apple products. They seem to be good at breaking stuff that worked for years when "enhancing" new OS.....and the new features are not useful to everyone. My external computer speaker no longer will play music from the iMac via bluetooth ( like that for at least a year!, and my car bluetooth just started to do that also.

If Apple cannot get their devices to synch properly with Bluetooth WTF are they doing when they Beta test????

Dec 2, 2023 2:15 AM in response to MacUser315

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.


Oct 17, 2023 12:01 PM in response to christianausbiedenkopf

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

Oct 17, 2023 1:51 PM in response to christianausbiedenkopf

Thanks Christian!


When I went to the first photo (out of over 2,000!), I discovered that it did not display and that instead one of the generic Apple wallpapers appeared. Same for the next three. I then selected the next one, which did show on the screen and started the rotation. That in itself may be a cause of the problem. I can’t see what causes it.


I let wallpaper cycle for awhile and then discovered that it is rotating through all photos that have my wife! I love that, but am curious why and how it can happen. I left it going, but stopped it before trying to cycle through all 2,000.


Ultimately, I found that I have grown accustomed to a single color wallpaper, so i switched back to that.


Through the whole time since wallpaper began to be a problem, my screensaver, which is set to cycle all photos, has done that without a hitch.


Thanks again,

peter

Oct 17, 2023 2:01 PM in response to christianausbiedenkopf

Hi Christian, that doesn’t work on Sonoma, a separate folder of pictures say on the desktop works fine. It’s the selection of a folder in Photos (app) that doesn’t work. The Ventura work around doesn’t work with Photos in Sonoma, what does is if you click and mount every photo shown in the Photos album then it will scroll through, but if you log out, shut it down,let it sleep for too long it fails again. If I copied all 4000 photos out of Photos and put the in a folder on the desktop then the wallpaper option of using your own photos works. Unfortunately I don’t have the space do do that…ps all my photos in Photos are on the computer, they are not cloud based…

Nov 26, 2023 12:16 PM in response to Mark_the_great

I found that braininpa's method seems to work.

Clicking on "show all" for a specific album (all photos in my case), scrolling down to the last picture in that album, selecting the last picture, click the random checkbox, and finally setting how often you want it to cycle seems to work.

I think I had to try this a few times before it worked though.

Mark

Dec 11, 2023 4:28 PM in response to Mark_the_great

Hello,

the reason for this issue is, the shuffle function can only show "downloaded" images. So if you click every image through the folder in the wallpaper tab the full size image are being downloaded and it can be used in the shuffle function. I think this cache is cleared after restarting your Mac and you have click on every image again.


Apple needs also to fix this issue.. maybe download the entire shuffle folder and make it persist.

Wallpaper not cycling through photos randomly

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