Mountain Lion desktop wallpaper won't change!

Hello Mr Linc,

I was wondering whether you could help me, as you seem to be one of the most seasoned contributors to these pages, hence I would really value your advice. (I tried to find a way to message directly but couldn't)

I had the same problem as many people, to do with Lion and the wallpapers defaulting back and I followed the advice below from another fellow user (in bold)...

If your wallpaper changes back to default (Galaxy) after reboot or after logout it is because

the wallpaper you set was on another drive.

and this drive loads after your settings are loaded.

MAC OS X Lion / Mountain Lion does not save your wallpaper on the native HDD, rather tries to load the wallpaper from the original HDD, i guess only the path to the wallpaper is saved in the OS X settings.

Anyways..

what happens is that when your OS X boots up it does not find the path to your wallpaper since the HDD you've saved your wallpapers in has not mounted yet. 😟

One basic solution for this is to save your wallpapers in the HDD where you've installed the MAC OS X..

but I didnt want to save all my wallpapers in Native Mountain Lion HDD, so i figured out my perfect fix..!!

This is how i fixed..

I found this file in my Lion install drive.. autodiskmount.plist

Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist

If you can't find it on your OS X Install Drive then you can make one by typing

<?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>

rename ur txt file to autodiskmount.plist

save this in your MAC OS X HDD

Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist

Voila..!!

restart your system..

Now save your wallpapers where ever you want on your computer and i didnt have to worry about the wallpaper changing back to default.

Anyway - getting to the point - following/authorising this advice wrecked my hard drive (something to do with the sensors ?) and has resulted in me having to pay around £308 over such a riduclous problem to start with.

So... Linc, I was wondering if you had any inkling on why this might have happened to my machine? The technicians have mentioned about what needs fixing (sensors/new HD etc) but no answers as to why it happened.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - cheers, Ben.

I've been having the same problem, MacBookPro w/Retina too. I found that moving the folder of pictures from ~/User/Pictures/myfolder to /Library/Desktop Pictures/myfolder, and adding that folder in Settings cured the problem. Using OS X 10.8.2. Trust Apple to break something so simple and not fix it in 2 updates *rolls eyes*

That still doesn't work for me! I agree, stupid that Apple broke this in 10.8 and it has yet to be resolved. I know there are bigger issues with the OS, but why did it break in the first place???

I was also having this issue on mutiple machines, what I found is that in my case it was related to firevault. If the disk is encrypted you can's change the wallpapers. I deavtivated firevault all worked as expected, reenabled it and again experienced the issue. Sorry for me the only fix it to diable encryption. So choose your desktop wisely before enableing encryption.

S_Marafie's solution worked for me!

Thanks

Stephen

This worked for me when the other suggestions I tried did not. However, I've only logged on/off once. Let's see it it stays fixed. 😀

Okay....I found a very very simple solution quite by accident. First off, please bear with me, I tend to be really long winded no matter how hard I try to be brief.

I tried the vast majority of the solutions here except for the really complex ones and none of them worked. But before I get to the solution, I'm on an iMac core i5 running OS 10.8.2. I'm also on a Mac that belongs to my church so there is a password login required. I have no idea if that makes a difference. I'm just putting the info out there.

So I went through all the steps of Marafie's solution, I logged out, logged back in and then right-clicked the desktop to select change my background from that pop up menu. But a funny thing happend. I couldn't see my pictures. The normal folder that I select from wasn't there. No problem, there is a plus and minus sign on the bottom of that window so I clicked that, navigated to the folder (which is on a different physical HDD), selected the picture and rebooted. Once again it reverted to the default galaxy picture. So I thought, lets try the pictures that are in the same folder that the default galaxy picture is in. I tried 3 or 4 of those pictures and wouldn't you know it, I rebooted successfully without it going back to the galaxy background.

So, one more thing to try, I took the jpeg that I was using as my background (the one on the separate HDD that wouldn't stay) Opened a finder window, navigated to Machintosh HD>Library>Desktop Pictures and I tried to drag the jpeg into that folder but got a (seemingly) ominous message. It said, "cannot perform the desired function because Desktop Pictures cannot be modified". That seemed a little scary (im a fairly newer mac user lol) but underneath the message window was 2 buttons, one said cancel and the other said authenticate. (I mean, how dangerous can this be, I'm just dragging a picture file from one folder to another) I hit the authenticate button and the password login screen came up. I input the pw, the file was dragged to the desktop pictures folder and NOW when I changed the screen to the imported jpeg, I could now log out, reboot, shut down, whatever, and on start up again, the selected picture remained and did not go back to the galaxy default picture.

I have no idea if this has already been addressed and I'm typing all of this in vain but the solution (at least for me) did appear to be that for the picture to not revert, the picture file must be in the desktop pictures folder.

Similar issue here, with a one week old MBP 15", with Moutain Lion as an original install. My desktop rapidly cycles endlessly between all the Apple supplied pictures. I cannot get it to stop nor can I select any other picture. It just started doing this randomly, it was fine for the first week.

I have tried deleting the preferences but that didn't do it. I currently don't have time to try anything else suggested because sadly the list of things I need to fix in Mountain Lion is getting ridiculously long.....

Do you still have this problem?..cause if you do i might have a solution

scott do you still have a problem with your desktop background pictures?

i still have the problem on both of my machines, i've tried the various suggestions posted here, none have resolved the issue. i've just resolved myself to not shutting down if at all possible and being prepared to reset the desktop if i do.

Scott do you use pathfinder on your mac???

Because if you use pathfinder i think i can solve your problem

yes. i have pathfinder..