Devir Kahan

Since upgrading to Mac OS X Lion I have been faced with a most peculiar issue when it comes to wallpapers. For some reason, when I set a wallpaper from, say, Safari (by right clicking and choosing to set it as my desktop wallpaper), if and when I restart my computer the wallpaper changes back to Lion’s default blue space wallpaper. I would imagine that the reason it does this is because the wallpaper set from Safari is not saved locally. In other words, that file was set as the wallpaper yes, but it was only stored temporarily on my actual Mac, and thus after a restart my Mac has no idea where that file is and thus reverts to default. You follow?

The strange thing is that this never used to happen in Snow Leopard and for the life of me I can’t understand why this would be an issue in Lion. I mean, what’s the point of an option in Safari that allows you to set a wallpaper if it’s not doing it correctly.

And I have to say, I don’t have a real solution to the problem other than wait and hope that Apple fixes it in a future release - which they very well may.

But just because I don’t have a ‘fix’ per se, doesn’t mean I don’t have a few ideas up my sleeve.

For one, you can download your wallpapers and save them in some sort of folder system. But that is convoluted and I would usually end up storing things like that in Yojibmo. But while folders would work to solve this issue, Yojimbo would not. For some reason saving things in Yojimbo is not seen by the system like it would be if it was saved in just a regular old folder. It probably has to do with the fact that Yojimbo stores everything in one special library folder. Me being me, I decided I would try to outsmart Lion and actually added the Yojimbo library folder to the list of wallpaper sources in System Preferences on my Mac. Yeah. Bad idea. That hung up Yojimbo, and in fact my entire system in one endless loop of stupidity. Another problem with Yojimbo in this regard, after that idea didn’t work, is that you cannot set a wallpaper from within Yojimbo but rather have to export it before you can do that. Once you have it on your desktop and right click to set it as the wallpaper, if you move that file to the trash you have exactly the same problem as setting a wallpaper from Safari.

So what to do? Well, change your wallpaper often. I tend to do that somewhat anyway, but if you’re changing your wallpaper anyway - which is always fun to do - it’s not too big a deal. I know that’s not really a solution, and it’s certainly not something to waste time over, but this is all only an issue after a restart after all. All I mean to say is find some nice wallpapers, and if and when you restart just swap it out like you would normally. That’s all I do. Use the restart as an opportunity to find a nice new wallpaper for yourself.

What I will say though, is for some nice wallpapers I recommend this. Just make sure to set it at the top to ‘Popular’ for ‘1 month’. You get the best results that way.