Photo Screen Saver not functioning with Yosemite Upgrade

Here is the solution that I have employed, and it seems to be working.

Click on Spotlight

Search for national geographic

The first hit should be the 1- National Geographic folder

Right click to show in Finder

Delete or move the Default Collections folders including: 1- National Geographic, 2-Aerial, 3-Cosmos, and 4-Nature Patterns

After you delete these folders, OSX no longer shows them in the Screensaver Preferences and can no longer reference them

Choose whatever folder of photos you want as your screensaver

This was too obvious to be believed. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm confidant this will be the fix I've been looking for.

Sorry gang! this also is not the answer. At least you don't see the Nat/Geo photos all you see now is a "no photos" message as it searches for the Default photos instead of my suggested folder. Gosh darn this bug!

The weirdest thing (other than the fact that Apple broke the screensaver in an update that didn't touch it) is that even after you delete the folder, it still resets to "1 - National Geographic". That folder path must be hardcoded somewhere in the system, or kept in some parameter that refuses to die.

In addition to having this problem will all of you as well, this update also wiped out ALL of my "gmails" which I get thru the Apple Mail program...Bad...

Repairing disk permissions has worked for me for a few days so far. Thanks for the post.

I did a clean install of Yosemite 10.10 and had the same issue. Did the .plist deletion... had some success in that the screensaver would continue to use the Dropbox folder I wanted, although it would not honor the "shuffle slide order" selection (i.e. it would uncheck that box about once per day). After about 2 weeks of that, today I was greeted with the National Geographic screensaver again. Ug.

I copied my own pics into the nat geo folder. Waste of space, but hopefully it will work

Like everyone here, certain "solutions" proved only to be temporary.

But, after three weeks without seeing the NatGeo screen saver, I may have figured it out.

Setting the Screen Saver "Start after:" option to 5 minutes seems to have solved the issue entirely for me.

I haven't experimented with other durations, but I wonder if the 5 minutes solves a "short term memory" issue where if the timer is left too long, it forgets what screen saver it should be displaying and it then reverts to the default NatGeo. Just a theory. But, like I said, I haven't seen the NatGeo in about 3 weeks. Coinciding with changing the Screen Saver "Start after" option.

Hope this helps.

I know this isn't a solution, but I did submit a bug report to Apple through their developer bug system. They responded confirming that they are aware of the issue and it's a duplicate of an existing issue they have in progress.

So officially, Apple is aware of the issue and is working on a fix. I know that's not a solution, nor is it a timeline or anything else - but at least it isn't getting ignored.

did this work? that's a great idea

The only solution that's worked for me was the one suggested by Markus Christoph on Nov 25 (and I've tried 'em all). It has survived restarts and power-downs. Note: For some unknown reason, I had two of the 1-National Geographic folders (and deleted both of them).

First 24 hours... working so far.

As in my original post, I have managed to get rid of the Nat Geo for a while by repairing the disk permissions, which works for a few days to a week most of the time, before I see Nat Geo again.

Anyways, this is a bug which is currently under investigation at Apple, they are working on it, and hopefully a solution will be found soon. This will then be implemented in a future software update. I got this information after I had been in contact with AppleCare and my case was forwarded to a senior technical advisor, who has been able to reproduce the error and has reported it to the engineering, but they were already aware of this.

Therefore, i would say be patient, most fixes just work for a few days...

For me too - repair disk permission did the trick and I am seeing again my pictures. No NG anymore 🙂 - stable for one week now. Thanks.