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Long story short, MBP 2020 13" running BigSur, connected to an external monitor via HDMI

Was just muckin' about with the desktop image for both the external monitor and the laptop and for some reason when I clicked on Photos, the machine didn't like that at all. And by "didn't like that" I mean the computer refused to display the image selected on the background.

Now the background image on the laptop is gone (the external monitor is still showing an image) and I cannot access the Desktop Preferences pane. Pain.

It's just a black screen on the laptop, and when I try to open the Desktop preferences pane; color wheel of death.

Strangely, the second user on my machine works just fine.

Any ideas? I imagine there are some /lib files that need to be removed but haven't found any related to the Desktop and/or desktopImage

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    I’ve never heard of deleting files in that directory as a fix for anything. Do you mean trying to fix your profile by deleting user library (hidden files) as a way to avoid restoring your data to a new account?
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 16:30
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    If it's tried & failed to add something incompatible to the desktop image, it might work to remove or replace from a backup the file at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist [untested].
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 17:31
  • Ahh, seems it's moved recently [I'm still on Mojave] - apple.stackexchange.com/questions/20136/…
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 17:33
  • @bmike Some basic googling lead me to such solutions; hence my question here; No I don't mean the second part of your question
    – J.R. Bob Dobbs
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 20:51
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    Welcome to Ask Different. I recommend you put an answer explaining what you did and what you think might be up. That helps everyone learn. Many will not initially know what you did not.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 0:50

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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opening Photos app and right clicking a photo (that was an acceptable format) and selecting "set as background image" seems to have resolved the issue.

The Desktop preferences pane is now accessible.

Long story short: do not attempt to set unsupported image types as background image.

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