Unable to change wallpaper on my Mac post Sonoma update

A workaround. Go to settings/wallpaper/your chosen Photos Album. Eventually (can take a while) your photo albums will list and there will be a thumbnail of each photo in the album. The first thumbnail is the non working 'cycle the album' activator. Any photo you click on becomes the wallpaper. Now keep clicking successively on as many as you want. Now go back to that first activator thumbnail and click on it. All photos you clicked will now cycle. I have 4100 photos in my 'wallpaper' album, but only have about 200 cycling. Good luck.

PS How many Sonoma updates do we have to wait for before Apple addresses this BIG FAIL. I think with 14.2 we have had 4.

Update, if I export a folder of (the same) images, and select folder instead of album, it works as expected. Clearly my gigabit internet connection is not fast enough and it times out without error.

Olde Skool beats cloud dependency once again

Thanks for you suggestion, but I fully understand the topic. How can you not know what issue I replied to? It's YOUR topic and you replied to it. I suggest you do better at following the topic before you criticize others' posts.

And for the record, the issue DOES go away after letting Sonoma settle in for a bit and then logging out/in again. I did this very thing on 3 of my 5 Macs, which all behaved identically. I also contacted a friend at Apple who said Sonoma has to do a ton of behind-the-scenes things that can affect various aspects of the running system -- especially if you login "too soon". Normally these activities are done during one (or some) of the potentially many reboots that occur when upgrading the OS, but it was causing people to become impatient and reboot their systems before the upgrade was complete...which causes more problems than having to wait. Of course I do not I think this is a valid solution, but it's more of a work-around until Apple can come up with a better way of smoothing out the installation process.

The best solution for any OS upgrade is to do it at a time you're not expecting to use the device right away. Fire off the update at night or whatever, then let it cook and simmer overnight. I did this with my other 2 Macs and and they all came up normal with no issues once the upgrade completed.

The work-around right now is to export the photos from the Photos Album that you want to use as Wallpaper, into a regular folder on your Mac. Then in the Wallpaper panel, choose that folder and you can randomize all the photos in that folder. So the bug is that it won't display all photos in an album in the Photos app, instead, you get the Apple Vineyard pic.

SIMPLE FIX:

1. Logout (NOT reboot)
2. Login again

No need to reboot. No need to gripe about what doesn't work. Just logout and back in again. It's either a bug or Sonoma hasn't finished doing it's under-the-hood housekeeping. Either way, it will smooth out and go away.

Apple monitors these forums. That's what the "Me Too" button is for. Replying with your own version of the same problem does nothing but pollute the message boards, especially if you're not providing an actual solution/workaround that might help others.

Doesn’t appear to be a “preview” or a way to instantly look at how it is like you can with photos.

It’s a bit slow. You need to click the little arrow to download the ones you’d like to use. If you want them to move like Apple TV Aerial screensavers and match the wallpaper, go to screensavers and choose there. Also select “Use as Wallpaper”. Do this for Wallpaper as well and also select “use as screensaver” - if you’d like them to match. In Lock Screen (in Settings) you can set how long after inactivity you’d like the screensaver to start. They’re beautiful.

If you’re using photos library, Sonoma will need to index/organize the pics, which can take a long time if you have.a lot. . Export a pic you want to use to a new folder with nothing in it and select it. Should appear fairly fast.

As i have posted before, if you click on each individual photo from the screen you attached to your post, then the album image, it will work. I see you only have 16 fungi photos, so that is easy. My chosen album has nearly 4000 photos, so until Sonoma 14.0 gets fixed, my wallpaper cycles only about 100 of them. Hope this workaround fixes your problem until Apple fixes it properly.

I was seeing this too, and found the issue: The photos I use are not in the Photos library, but in a couple of folders. These photos are my iCloud files area and so the system occasionally decide it's smarter than me and deletes the local version, keeping them online. I went to the directory in question and forced iCloud to download them all.

So Apple really needs to do two things:

1. Allow users to flag certain directories as "always available" as does all of the iCloud competitors.
2. Automatically download images is such directories.

I did not see this behavior prior to Sonoma.

The download is a bit slow, probably due to all the upgrades now. There is a small progress wheel in the upper right corner of the wallpaper preview that will show download progress.

I had the same problem. I went to the picture I wanted as my wallpaper, right clicked it, and chose "set as desktop picture" and it worked!

I've just updated to Sonoma 14.1. After a delay whilst it seems to re-index photos, I still have the same problem of not cycling one of my albums. The workaround I used before still seems to be the only solution.

1. select chosen album.
2. click on 'show all'
3. click on individual photos which will now be your wallpaper.
4. repeat step 3 as many times as you want with different photos within the album.
5. now click the double arrow to select the album.
6. Any photo from step 3 will now cycle.

I have over 4000 photos so I only click about 100. They cycle as it should.

Strangely, screen saver works properly.

Finally called Apple Support. Spent two hours on the phone with some very helpful folks. They were at a loss too as to why the new upgrade caused all the issues. To make a long story short, they had me delete the Sonoma upgrade and reinstall it. It was scary as I wasn't sure I had everything saved in iCloud. It took about an hour, but it all came back and my whole iMac is working better than it ever did. As a side note, my husband has the exact same computer as mine and his did the same ting mine did the next day after my reinstall. He just called them and said he wanted a reinstall so he wouldn't have to go through the diagnostics and steps I had to do. We are both happy with the results, but there definitely needs to be a bug fix for this issue.

Apple just posted an update to fix the problems (or some of them) to this disaster called Sonoma that we have all been griping about for the past month. Go to your system prefs, general, updates or go directly to Apple to download the fix.

Sonoma 14.2 does not fix the random wallpaper from a 'Photos' album. The work-around is still to use a folder of images saved on your Mac and it will randomize the images in a folder, but not from an Album in Photos.