Choosing desktop wallpaper from (my) Photos in macOS Sierra

Hm. Thanks. Wow, Apple does not make these things intuitive. I put "Desktop" in the search at the top of Photos, and it returned no results. Isn't that function supposed to find menu items? (At least it's better than the "Photos Help" function, which gave me a spinning wheel for thirty minutes last night before I gave up on it).

On my computer at least, the share button is not letting me select more than one photo. If I choose one picture, the "Set Desktop Picture" appears, but if I choose more than one, that option doesn't appear.

I turned the computer off overnight and turned it on again this morning, about 90 minutes ago. Still no repopulation in the Desktop pane under Desktop & Screensaver. But "photolibraryd" and "photoanalysisd" are both taking up a decent chunk of % CPU, so I'll let it run and run and run and see what happens.

Well, the computer's been on all day, with me using it in the morning, and then away for the afternoon so presumably it was sleeping (I'm not sure what's going on with the photoanalysisd process when the computer isn't in use). The different photo functions are still taking up at least 20%, and sometimes far more, or more of CPU. When I look in the Desktop & Screen Saver settings, I am at least now getting the folders and albums within Photos. I clicked on the folder I want to select desktop wallpapers from about 40 minutes ago but it still isn't populated. However, at least it's now appearing.

So ... progress! But if you're on an iMac that's around seven years old, you may need to be very, very patient.

And I gotta say that this new thing with "Oh great I type in a Safari field and sometimes I don't see the letters appear for about 10 to 20 seconds" isn't something I'm excited about.

Well, no luck. It's been a week since I installed Sierra. Now when I go into the Systems & Preferences / Desktop & Screensaver / Desktop pane, I initially see the Apple option (with little triangle icon that can toggle) and "Folders" option. After perhaps three minutes the "iPhoto" line appears, and then the "Photos" lines appears another ten or fifteen minutes after that. But now those two lines never populate with folders at all.

A few days back, Photos was eventually populating with folders and albums, and I could select some but not all of them as Desktop Wallpaper. Now those folders or albums never appear. (While this is happening, in Activity Monitor, Systems Preferences is highlighted in red as Not Responding, sometimes taking as much as 40% of CPU, but mostly at 0%.)

For what it's worth, often (but not always) when I try to sync my iPhone or iPad I get "Photos Library not available, please try again later" alert, and when I turn on the Apple TV (4th gen), more often than not Photos won't appear as an option in the Home Sharing menus. Reboots and closing and opening apps sometimes eventually bring these functions back, but unpredictably. Actually making use of my Photos library is proving very difficult, but I have no idea if these different problems are connected.

I'm not using iCloud Photo Library at all. I do still have iPhotos on my iMac, but I haven't opened it in months. Part of me is assuming that these problems are just because my iMac is getting old, but on the other hand, the past few years of developments with iPhoto and then Photos haven't exactly convinced me things would work much better on a newer machine.

Thanks léonie. Yes, "Use as System Photo Library" is greyed out.

I assume the library is in the default location - [Home] / Pictures / Photos Library - Main.photoslibrary. It's on the internal drive of the iMac.

Note that I don't always get the "not available" warning with iTunes. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. When it's there, a combination of reboots and restarts (Photos, iPhone and/or iPad, iMac) eventually seems to make it work again. Ditto with the sharing on the Apple TV.

Thanks again. I've just repaired the library (sixth? seventh? time this year). I'm still not seeing the Photos line populate in the Desktop & Screen Saver panel, but "photoanalysisd" and "photolibraryd" are both now taking up plenty of CPU (they did that when I first upgraded to Sierra, but had finished four or five days ago), so perhaps I'll see progress after they've done their job.

OK, the repair library step seems to be what helped with the wallpaper. The different photoXXX processes were running for about 30 minutes, and after they finished, I opened Systems and Preferences and this time the folders from Photos populated the pane. I could choose what I wanted.

Slight tangent: if you've got multiple desktops, it seems to be impossible to select the wallpaper for all of those desktops. Instead you need to delete all but one of the desktops, set that one remaining desktop to what you want, and then add additional desktops; the additional ones will have the same settings as the first, but will fortunately choose a different picture if you've got it set to random selection from an album. As best I can tell, you can't have different wallpapers set for different desktops, but that was the case with at least the past couple of operating systems.

On the Apple TV, "Photos" is at least now appearing under Home Sharing, but I just get a spinning wheel when I select it - which to be fair is what's happened around 30% of the time since I bought the thing a year ago anyway (and has been the cause of a few of those earlier library repairs I've done). However, at least the issue for this thread seems to be resolved. Thanks!

EDIT: Oh hey, 20 minutes later the photos appeared properly on the Apple TV. That's cool. So I just hope things stay stable for a while now.

Interesting - do you keep the wallpapers fixed, or do they change?

I basically have pretty much all of my landscape-orientation favorites set as desktops, so the computer is rotating through a couple thousand images. I wouldn't really want to export that many to a separate folder.

At one point I was trying to set it up so one desktop would be rotating pictures of family, another would be pictures of Asia, another would be pictures of North America - chosen from different smart albums - but I couldn't make it work through Photos. But it wasn't a big deal. I've got back what I want now.