Q: Desktop Wallpaper keeps going back to the standard wallpaper after reboot

Dear Softwater, thank you soooooo much for your easy but effective cure to the problem.

this works! thanks! but everytime i want to change my wallpaper, i have to do this again, otherwise it still goes back to the old wallpaper, has anyone the same problem? thanks!

I have several desktops and have all of them set to randomly rotate desktop photos among my favorites.  Like everyone else here, they kept reverting to the galaxy image.  For me, this did not happen on restart like for some others but only during normal use.  In fact, when I restarted they all set properly to one of my photos.  I tried deleting the plist file and it did not work.  But I finally found the solution.  Someone suggested that the reason for reverting was that the desired photo could not load in time for whatever reason.  My photos were high resolution and evidently they were too large.  I exported copies of my favorite photos at a lower resolution and put these smaller files in a separate folder.  This folder should be on your local drive rather than a shared/external/network drive for faster loading.  This was over a week ago and even since then the dreaded galaxy image has been nowhere to be seen!

P.S. Most photo applications allow you to export to a specified resolution.  My screen resolution width is 1920 pixels so I export my photos to 1920 pixels wide and they look great on my screen.

Terminal spits this back out at me:

rm: (My User)/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Desktop.plist: No such file or directory

Still any thoughts?

Thank you for the explanation. I much rather prefer your explanation than a simple "delete 'com.apple.desktop.plist'" answer, which the problem could come back again, whereas your solution lasts. Thank you again.

I am getting the "No such file or directory" as well.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I tried all the suggestions in this thread and they did not solve my problem, I got the same message, the system plist file could not be found.  Ahmed21788's post did the trick for me.  My desktop wallpapers were on an external drive. Once moved to the HDD, no issues on boot or login.

You all are some smart Mother Chickens.

Ahmed's method seems to be the most full proof. However I wasn't able to make a .plist in textEdit so I had to use xCode to create a new plist and I just pasted

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="0.9">

<dict>

<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>

</dict>

</plist>

into the new .plist and set it as a data type. Then I moved it under Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/ and restarted the computer. So far, all of my backgrounds (running on lion) have been saved.

Terminal is supposed to spit that back out, if you log out and then log back in, set the background then re-log out and log in, the background should save. I found that using terminal isn't as full-proof as Ahmed's method though because when you try to change your other wallpapers in lion (if you have multiple home screens) the desktop backgrounds will all reset if you log out and back in. So use Ahmed's method because that way you are saving the .plist and it will run every time you restart the computer or turn it on.

Does not work for the respond i have is:

Last login: Sun Nov 23 17:54:05 on console

[JM:~] jm% rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Desktop.plist

rm: /Users/jm/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Desktop.plist: No such file or directory

Thank you so much!

Or for those who want a non-terminal fix: just add your pictures to Macintosh HD/Library/Desktop Pictures

Thanks!  This fixed my issue!

I love when people take the time to help others with the most minute of issues. Sometimes I forget to show my appreciation when I receive help from forums but I wanted to say thank you. Even in February 2, 2016 this still works.

pliist does not work on my Mac Pro = On phone with Apple right now - Ridiculous that I have to spend time on this