This one has me stumped. After upgrade to OS 10.11 the login window displayed El Capitan desktop picture. I thought this was a cool, unannounced easter egg type thing. After using it though, the image changed to my homescreen desktop image.
I dont know how it happened or how to change it to some default image.
Any ideas?
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11), B/W G3: Retired
Use System Prefrences> Desktop & Screensaver> Desktop, the image you want is the first to be seen in Apple>Desktop Pictures
Thanks Eau Rouge. This isn't for my desktop image. It's about user login screen.
the login screen uses the desktop image. usually from desktop 1, how many dektops do you have.
Your login screen uses your desktop background, whatever it is. Also, this isn't something new to El Capitan, the same thing was a part of Yosemite as well.
There are two users. One has three desktops, the other just one.Its the ser desktop users image on the login screen.
so if you take user 1 the login image should be their desktop (1) image, if you want to have the el capitan image you first saw you need to change that desktop
background to the one i mentioned in my first post.
Thanks Eau Rouge. After playing around a bit I found that the second user with one desktop controls the login screen. Prior to El Capitan it was tied to my account.
Its an odd behavior that I'll have to get used to I suppose. Somehow the second user account has taken dominance.
My wife will say as it should be. 😕
could be an alphabetical thing, anyhow love honour and obey
enjoy el capitan.
I played around some more and renamed my account to be first alphabetically and that wasn't it. I did find that I'm the 501 user so I should be dominant account but not, alas.
The login image is surprisingly easy to change.
It is in
/Library/Caches/com.apple.desktop.<user501>.png
(replace <user501> with the actual short name of that user)
So just take the image you want, put it in the /Library/Caches folder, and rename acoording to the rule as above.
There is no need to restart your mac. Just log out and you will be presented with the new login window background.
Thanks Luis. That is actually the answer I was looking for. I just found though that you can't change the name but you can delete it and a new one is created. At least now I know how to change it. Dont tell her I said this but I dont like my wife's desktop pix.
Thanks Luis. It just worked perfectly for me. The background that was saved there was under my Admin user name. Just need to replace the png file with same name and picture size, then no more blurred image at login !
Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly in hindsight (but it confused me), if you had an image set as your desktop background and then changed the folder the image is from and set the images to change, your login window image will stay as the last image you set as your desktop image, and will not update to one from the new folder of images. You'll have to chose a single image from your new folder of images, set that as your desktop background, then have the images change.
This won't work in macOS 10.12 Sierra. It still worked in the last El Capitan release. Apple has changed this and some other stuff that has stopped working. The previous locations are not valid anymore. The same applies, for example, to the screensaver timing issue, of which I posted an entry previously.
How to change Login Window image?
