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photos missing on desktop & screen saver menu

Hello! I use a MacBook Air (M1,2020) and a few months ago an issue appeared - photos from the Photos app suddenly weren't showing on the desktop & screen saver menu anymore. Only a few of them are showing but most are not. On the second screenshot, you can see that a few photos from a week ago are showing. It's like it chooses at random to show some photos, but the rest is missing. Thаt's the case in the other folders too, but there are completely empty ones also. I use iCloud and all photos are backed up there and nothing is missing from the Photos app.

Unfortunately, I procrastinated on searching for a solution and now I don't remember what I did or what happened right before the issue appeared. I updated my MacBook recently, now I'm with Monterey 12.0.1 and it did not fix this issue.





And literally just now another random photo from a while ago appeared:




And I don't understand what the iCloud symbols mean either. There was one next to "Monterey Graphic" which disappeared and now there are two on some of the photos:

Posted on Jan 1, 2022 11:56 PM

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Posted on Feb 20, 2022 3:13 PM

All these suggestions to resort to Time Machine to fix a problem are unhelpful and drastic. Obviously there is a problem and from all indications Apple does not care to fix it. I am having a similar problem the screen saver is just showing colored shapes, no pictures

8 replies

Jan 20, 2022 11:47 AM in response to PRP_53

I updated to Monterey 12.1. Still have the problem of some photos not appearing in the pane for desktop selector. For Screensaver, sometimes the list shows up and sometimes it doesn't. I was able to select an Album from my Photos library for screensaver but some of the photos appear in "original" state (before being edited) yet in the Photos app on both mac and phone, edited versions of the photos show.??????

Feb 10, 2022 7:47 AM in response to mash182

I have same "issue" that formerly all images in my photos would cycle through on my desktop when chosen in the system preferences desktop and screen saver feature. With the past several upgrades, this "link" has been dysfunctional. There is some code glitch which only allows the function to secure images from about a year or more ago. Any new images in the past 18-months or so are never shown/seen using this function. The screen saver choice always works but the ability to "find" my photos seems to be damaged or not able to "see" the entire catalogue of images/pics. Frustrating and not a seamless OS transition. If this is being addressed in future updates, please advise. If there is a "work around" that can reconnect this image library to the desktop image function in system preferences, that would be excellent.

photos missing on desktop & screen saver menu

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