Screen saver in High Sierra

Question

Level 1

9 points

Screen saver in High Sierra

In High Sierra (and previous OS) my screen saver is set to randomly go through the whole of My Pictures. But, very often, it soon reverts to "looping" round and round the same group of pictures, anything from 20 to 50 of the. How do I stop this and get it to go on randomly selecting different pictures?

iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12.5)

Posted on Dec 10, 2017 1:59 PM

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Answer 1

chris_g1

Community Specialist

Dec 11, 2017 12:48 PM in response to JBowfin

Hey there, JBowfin!

Thanks for stoping by the Apple Support Communities. From your post, I understand that the screen saver for your iMac is set to display all of photos in the My Pictures folder at random, but eventually will revert to just a specific set of 20-50 of them. I'd be happy to help!

First, if you have not already, try restarting your iMac. You can do this by selecting the Apple  menu, and choosing 'Restart...' from the drop down. If the issue continues after restarting, try booting to safe mode, and see if the issue continues there. More information on safe mode, including what booting to it does, as well as how to boot to it, can be found here: Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac - Apple Support .

If the problem continues in safe mode, the next recommendation I can make is to try the screen saver settings in a new user account. You can learn about why a new user account can be helpful, and how to set one up, in this article: How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac - Apple Support .

Don't hesitate to respond back if you still need help. If you do, please include the answers to the following questions:

Where are your pictures stored--on your computer's hard drive, or on an external hard drive?
Do you notice a specific cause for the other pictures to stop, such as the computer going to sleep and waking up or a particular app being used?
What is the current macOS High Sierra version listed under the Apple  menu > About This Mac (10.13.2, for example).

Cheers!

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Answer 2

JBowfin Author

Level 1

9 points

Dec 12, 2017 11:17 AM in response to chris_g1

Thanks for the offer of help. If necessary I will try Safe Mode and/or opening another account. I have restarted several times, but the "looping" always reappears eventually - with different lengths of loop!

Answering your other questions: I am on 10.13.2, which went in without problems; the photos are on the Mac's internal 1 TB hard drive (of which 75% is still available); and I have not identified any "trigger' event or appwhich creates the "looped" set of photos. I backup the whole machine to an external 2 TB hard drive, using Time Machine, but I do not include the photos in my iCloud backup as they are too big (when I sort this problem out I will probably pay for more iCloud) - although all that is of course irrelevant to the "looping" problem.

I am also trying to see if I can create a randomised screen saver using Photos - following an idea in the support community (dialabrain and Noach on December 10) which is using iPhotos but that does not seem to work

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