Catalina Screensaver Problem

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Level 1

9 points

Catalina Screensaver Problem

Since updating to MacOS 10.15 Catalina I have found an annoyance with using "My Photos" for the screensaver and Desktop background. I suspect an introduced bug.

I have have (had) a number of MacBook and iMac devices that have customised Screensavers and background images. They are part of the Photo Library which is integrated with iCloud. I have two shared albums "Backgrounds" and "Screen Saver Shots", with 20 and 700 images respectively.

I go to System Preferences and select these under the Shared Cloud in the appropriate sections of Desktop and Screen Saver.

Problem: After a period of time these images "disappear" from the Desktop & Screen Saver Cloud selections as if they have disappeared. They have for the required tasks, and the Desktop & Screen Saver controls "reset" to the default Catalina images. NOTE: These images have NOT be removed from the system as I can still access and view them from the Photos application.

This problem still exists in MacOS 10.15.3.

A temporary work-around is go into Photos and look at each image individually, and then reselect the shared "Cloud" libraries in System Preferences / Desktop & Screen Saver. NOTE: If you only view two, three or twenty images in Photos, only two, three or twenty will be visible from the shared "Cloud" library.

This work-around looks to only work for a few days before they disappear again!

I strongly believe that this is a underlining Catalina bug. Can anyone assist?

Gavin

Posted on Jan 31, 2020 11:14 PM

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Answer 1

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cah329a

Level 1

16 points

Feb 19, 2020 2:06 PM in response to how-to-fix

I've been poking at this one for a few weeks myself. Screensaver would start, but showed "No photos" even when I thought I'd selected the Albums folder and the little preview looked like it was working. Today I poked at it again, and couldn't even see where it had said "Albums" -- I just saw "No photos" in the little preview. But I DID see where I could choose "Photo Library" in the "Source" dropdown. So I opened up Photos, created a Smart Album with the condition "Album is Anything". Then I went back to the screensaver Source dropdown, clicked "Photos", selected my new Smart Album and voilá! The photos from my library showed up in the little preview, and when I started the screensaver full-blown, it worked perfectly.

My suggestion would be that you create a new Smart Album with the condition "Album is Screen Saver Shots" and see if that solves the problem. Or you could tag all of those 700 photos in your shared folder and use the tag to create a new smart folder (or 2, one for backgrounds and one for the screensaver. just use different tags). It's a pretty elegant workaround since you should be able to open that existing folder and tag everything at the same time.

Good luck!

Cindy

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Catalina Screensaver Problem

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