Wallpaper not cycling through photos randomly

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…

same issue, called apple about it (they are aware of the issue) this was about a month ago though. very disappointing especially for my parents who love their backgrounds and I made them special wallpaper photos on each of their macs.

you do not have to hold down anything- just click on first pic - then the last pic - then select the first pic again - then CYCLE and you should be good to go. I have tried it on a folder that has over 16000 pics and it seems to work.

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.

I'm having this issue for years now, with different Macs, different OSXs and my large album (> 1.000 pics). Probably a memory or time out problem with large albums. Apple didn't get this to work for larger albums for years now. A pity.

Better with clean up option, which will also delete pictures that are no longer tagged:

#!/bin/sh

/Users/xxx/.local/bin/osxphotos export /Users/xxx/Pictures/bg.osxphotos --skip-original-if-edited --update --cleanup --keyword "bg" 2>&1

[Edited by Moderator]

Thank you! I can confirm that, as of June 20, 2024 (Sonoma 14.5), this workaround is functioning as expected. In my case, I have enough room so I just made a folder that lives on my desktop and I add drag over pics from Photos as I want to add more.

You should see a bar labeled "Add photo or album." That leads to a drop down menu from which you can choose the folder with your photos.

Similar problem here: 'random' selection from 'all photos' only cycles among the same few pictures. I have tried everything Mark did. Also rebuilt photo library. No help.

This only started happening recently.

Mac Air M1, OS 13.5.1

Thanks for any help.

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????

We should see in a few days, but it appears that the OS which shall not be named has this rotating images on Desktop fixed...

You should start a new thread with that bluetooth issue. That is not normal experience, and could well be due to some software conflict, specific to your setup.

Not a random issue. I think it's because of different Bluetooth protocols. A couple years ago I went from an SE 1st to SE 2d and the new phone won't pair with an old Motorola car speaker. It will pair with a new Besign speaker.

Thanks for posting this. I was wondering if the new OS would fix it. Seems not. I’m not interested in the ‘social media’ (think asocial media) features of sonoma so now I know there’s no reason for me to install it...

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

OK, so I click on All Photos. Do I hold down command or shift as I scroll down to the last photo? Is it important what sequence I check random and 5 seconds? Before or after scrolling? If I check these after scrolling, what is the setting before I scroll? My goal is to have each of my 13,000+ photos cycle every 5 seconds randomly. My All Photos Wallpaper is a little adventure for me that I miss, since I used to be able to do this pre-Sonoma. Thanks, Mark, if you or someone could reply?