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wallpaper not working in mac os sonoma

I have an 2019 iMac 21.5 and installed OS Sonoma two days ago. I setup my wallpaper to randomly select photos from a personal folder and it worked for the first day. Now when I start up my machine, I only get a black screen. I tried switching to one of the Apple images, restarted and it still gives me a black screen. The lock screen is also black. The screen saver works using the same folder of photos. Has anyone had the same issue and been able to find a fix?

Posted on Oct 3, 2023 11:13 AM

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Posted on Nov 16, 2023 4:49 AM

I've been using Apple OS systems for 20 years, and never had a problem with putting up wallpaper. Sonoma doesn't work. Please stop with useless workarounds and just fix it. You have dozen of OS's to look back at for excellent wallpaper accessibility.


Everytime I start up my mac mini, it opens with the wallpaper I want, then immediately stops and goes black for a second, then comes back with the Sonoma Horizon photo from Landscape on the screen (Landscape is not selected), and the Picture box is blank. So again I add a photo, and it holds that photo until I close the computer. Then the same thing the next day. I have tried many of the workarounds that I've found online, and none work. I don't want a workaround. As for the past 20 years, I want to select a photo (or whatever) and have that be my wallpaper, until I change it.

75 replies

Dec 15, 2023 4:24 PM in response to miama999

14.1.1, 14.1.2 and now 14.2 and drum roll! The wall paper feature to enable a user to use their own photo’s does not work. In 14.2 you cannot even fool the system by choosing photo’s one by one from my self made wallpaper photo folder to create a small selection that did at least randomly switch every chosen time frame (this ‘fix’ worked in 14.1.2). So it has gone from bad to worse - no random use of any of my photos. And through all this the screen saver feature works - using the exact same process of randomly displaying photo’s from a self collated folder. So Apple what is going on? It is way passed time to fix this problem. I want to be able to use a random selection of my photo’s not the prepared one’s Apple provide.

Dec 24, 2023 6:23 AM in response to 4ggs

Four iterations of Sonoma - most recent today 14.2.1 - drum roll! Apple still have not fixed the wallpaper feature!


The wall paper feature to enable a user to use their own photo’s does not work. Through all this the screen saver feature works - using the exact same process of randomly displaying photo’s from a self collated folder. So Apple what is going on? It is way past time to fix this problem. I want to be able to use a random selection of my photo’s not the prepared one’s Apple provide. It is very tiresome that Apple do not seem to be addressing this very basic of problems. This is not the slick or customer focused organization to whom I paid money to for what is portrayed as a premium product.

Jan 25, 2024 3:22 PM in response to 17Smithers71

What I've noticed since the latest update is that the Wallpaper extension in System Settings tends to crash often and requires that you close System Settings and reopen it. Go back and select the wallpaper options again then click out of the wallpaper section.


I don't know what's causing the crash, but I also noticed that when I use images from any iCloud folder and those images/files are not downloaded to the drive, those images are skipped, and that sometimes causes a crash with the Wallpaper extension of System Settings when I attempt to select an image that isn't downloaded. So much for using images in the cloud.


Jan 28, 2024 7:28 AM in response to Stephen Antonacci

If Apple continue to act like an Ostrich they will loose buyers. Sonoma 14.3 wallpaper user option to use their own folder of wallpaper images does not work! It hasn’t worked from the introduction of Sonoma. Why I do not know. I also do not understand why - the same function works perfectly fine with screen savers. No amount of sending feedback to Apple seems to work. We users are being ignored.

wallpaper not working in mac os sonoma

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