Unable to change wallpaper on my Mac post Sonoma update

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.

I had the same experience after following the Mission Control suggestion. After restarting my iMac, I had only the grey/black screen - except on the additional screens created through Mission Control. I spent nearly two hours on phone with Apple Care yesterday. The end result was a suggestion from a senior advisor that the problem is my user profile and I'll need to wipe my computer clean and rebuild from Time Machine. Not willing to do that yet.

Have had this problem since day 1.

Screensaver is working with the selected album from Photos, screensaver isn't.

When selecting a folder on local hard drive it's ok, but having all my pictures in photos I am stuck now with the default wallpaper.

They are nice, but I was disappointed to learn that they do not move in background, only when screen is locked or as a screensaver.

So please fix the issue when selecting a folder or album from photos. Single pictures ARE shown and when I select each one of the album separately the whole album works - until I make a change again. But clicking through 400+ pictures each time is no solution.

The same thing happened to me. I left it overnight and when I came back it was working as intended. My guess was that it needed to download a large number of videos... Which everyone else was also downloading at the same time.

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.

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 verified with Apple that all of the wallpaper-related issues with Sonoma are different manifestations the problem I described earlier. I have been working with low-level OS code for decades and this type of thing is very common, albeit most of the time it's caught during unit/alpha/beta testing. Granted, the issue(s) could've been hashed out better, but hindsight is 20/20.

Once the root cause is found (if not already), the fix will most likely be simple and it will have the appearance of solving multiple problems -- this is because all wallpaper-related features use a common set of subsystem calls. If one of those system calls is buggy, LOTS of features will appear to be individual bugs.

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Sonoma on my iMac

I used system settings wallpaper option:

I wanted to change my desktop background to a pattern.

After you pick the pattern there is no button for DONE or SET

I can get a pattern to show on Lock Screen but it goes away after I log in

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.

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.

@Richard Amis: thank you, yours is the only reply that seems to work for me. The logout/login didn't work, so for now I've individually clicked about 20 images from my "backgrounds" album, then clicked the shuffle again. These 20 images are now shuffled.

And waiting for the next Sonoma release in the hope this is fixed.

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.

Previously, if you chose Preferences>Wallpaper and selected a desktop picture folder containing hundreds of images, the wallpaper would change sequentially every "X" minutes; when the computer was shut down and then restarted, the wallpaper would continue to change sequentially, starting from the last wallpaper displayed. However, after upgrading to Mac OS Sonoma, this no longer happens, i.e. each time the Mac is restarted, the wallpaper starts from the beginning without following the sequence, as if it were reset at each restart. Sounds like a system bug to me. Any suggestions?

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.