I don’t sync my photos to iCloud and it works from me. But I chose manually and checked off the images I wanted. I don’t store all my photos on my phone. I do offload from time to time via Preview app on mac,
Still, I like this lock screen feature. And its easy to make another Lock Screen, use this feature. If you want to revert to previous Lock screen, just hold down on the Lock screen and you’ll see previous ones. I have about five… A Legacy with original Lock/Home, another for weather, another for work, and now one with the Photo Shuffle.
I only thought so because many of the “it’s not working” pages that I found online mentioned iCloud syncing.
I updated to 16 the end of October, about a month ago. I think I went from 15.7 to 16.1
iPhone 13 Mini
Did Tonya’s say it was processing? Again reading pages out there it sounds like some get stuck on “processing” for days but I never saw that.
I’ve probably played the Memories thing a handful of times over the past year. They pop up on occasion, I never go looking for them.
The Featured Photos on the tab in Photos are completely different than what’s offered in the lock screen section, and there are always only 10 there.
Did you mean “black hole”? LOL!
Diane
Yes, it did report that it was processing for quite a few days before it eventually finished. Perhaps there was a restart or something else in there as well—impossible to know.
How did you do that, Alan? When I tried to customize mine, I was only given the option to create a new one which I DON’T want to do as I’m happy with the one I’ve had for 15 years.
Like everyone else, I couldn’t modify the provided screen; I needed to find the original photo and re-create the Lock Screen. What was hell was that I also needed to re-create the Home Screen wallpaper, which depended on the precise realignment of some features of the original. I believe that in 16.1, Apple no longer forces you to create a new Home Screen background when changing the Lock Screen.
By the way, in order to find the photo in your photo library, first go into the Photos app and mark it as a Favorite. The Favorite album is always one of the first ones listed for selection.
Jane, so far the only problem I’ve had with the update to iOS 16.1 is that now every time I start a back up to my iMac in either iTunes or iMazing, I’m required to enter my password. I did not have to do it with iOS 16.0.3 but it started with the 16.1 update.
1 Like
Dennis you have to create a new one. :( Apple didn’t give us a way to modify our existing one.
I did that when I first updated, then I had to create another one to activate the Photo Shuffle.
Diane
I did some more research last night. There are a lot of threads around about this not working, and people just getting one option in Photo Shuffle.
One of the thing I saw said to go into Photos and make sure your people are identified, and that it is finished processing. I do have a person identified, I added more and lo and behold, Photos (not Photo Shuffle) told me it needed to process, that I had to put the phone on power and lock it. I did so, woke up this morning, it was finished processing, but I still just have Nature in Photo Shuffle.
I stumbled on another thread that said you will only get 20 or so photos but that the phone will delete and add more randomly. That has not happened to me yet either.
Since this has been happening for months I guess I’ll be happy with what I have though I suppose I can file a bug report. Not worth spending time on the phone with support.
Diane
All I wanted to do was reduce that fugly huge time display to the minimum. At least on my iPad Mini, the lock screen is mostly a white background so the fugly time is barely noticeable. Sigh, another dumb “we don’t care what the user wants” action from Apple. IF they did, then the screen time font would be completely customizable as any user desires. I would also like to have a lock screen that doesn’t have ANYTHING on top of the wallpaper, as even the previous constant time display annoys me.
1 Like
I loved reading this article, and I’m getting great results. I just have two questions:
One is it possible to turn off notifications on the lock screen globally, or do I have to turn that off in each application?
Two. Is this feature available on iPad OS 16? the methods described for iPhone 16. Don’t seem to work on the iPad.
Each app, but you can change settings / notifications to default to count rather than stack or list, which will show just a count of notifications at the bottom.
iPhone only for now. Probably not on the iPad before iPadOS 17.
As for me, I have a few lock screens set up, but the one that I use the most is a photo shuffle of Vincent Van Gogh paintings that I downloaded to my photo library, creating a manual shuffle, and the photo changes each hour. The last time I used Android I used an app that downloaded a different art masterpiece as a Lock Screen and Home Screen each day, and I’ve long missed something like that. Of course this isn’t quite the same, but I could set up my own thing. I also like the bokeh version of each painting as my home screen background.
1 Like
Hi Doug, thank you so much for your suggestions. That’s a great help.
Diane,
I also had the notice at the bottom of the People and Places album that Photos needed to complete scanning. So I locked the iPhone and left it connected to power overnight. Sure enough, next morning the notice was gone, although I didn’t notice any changes to the photos chosen for 7 people in the album.
In another effort to ‘kickstart’ the iOS people processing, I added 2 more faces to the People collection, and let Photos ruminate on that for another night.
Even so, the “People” selector for photos chosen for the Lock screen still only offers two (of the now 9) people in the People gallery. The other options (Pets, Nature, Cities) all seem to work fine - my lock screen will randomly display photos with those characteristics. But it refuses to display any photos of my kids on the lock screen.
The Featured Photos gallery (under For You) is now getting updated with new pix. No rhyme nor reason to what it chooses, but it’s fun to see see photos I took years ago spontaneously appear.
David,
I seem to have gotten a new photo in my lock screen nature shuffle the other day. It showed up in both Nature and Featured. (all my featured photos in the lock screen are actually nature photos)
I still only have the Nature option for the lock screen.
The For You/Featured Photos in Photos shows me 10 different pix every day - I wonder if the lock screen is supposed to pull from that? But it’s definitely not in my case.
Diane
Diane,
My lock screen is definitely not pulling any photos from my For You/Featured Photos album. It shuffles a variety of pix of Pets, Nature, and Cities. Plus shots of two of the nine people in my People and Places gallery.
I tried getting pix of my kids to appear on the lock screen by favoriting each of them in the People gallery, but that made no difference.
My iPhone is still on 16.0.3. Perhaps it’s time to update to 16.1.1 and see if that changes things.
With these kinds of articles, please make a point of distinguishing which features require that iCloud Photo Library be enabled! I realize that Apple users who aren’t using iCloud Photo Library by now are probably a minority, but in my case I still can’t do it - Apple doesn’t offer a high enough storage plan. Between the very large Photo repository on my home Mac (I also use DSLR etc), plus the iCloud storage needs of Family Sharing, I would need more than the 2TB max currently offered. I am perfectly fine NOT using iCloud Photo Library, however I find Apple seems to keep adding features that are only relevant with it enabled.
We certainly have no opposition to mentioning such requirements when we know them, but (for instance) I’m unaware of Apple publishing anything that says the Lock Screen Photo Shuffle wallpaper requires iCloud Photos. The company says nothing on the main iOS 16 features page, nor on the User Guide page about the feature.
And it’s difficult if not impossible to imagine and verify all the conditions in which a feature will not work. Glenn and I both use iCloud Photos, and turning it off is not something I’d do willy-nilly because of the questions surrounding removing photos from the iPhone. I never even considered that the Photo Shuffle feature required iCloud Photos—nothing in how it’s described or works would suggest that.
So the question for you is what do you see when you attempt to enable Photo Shuffle in iOS 16, given that you don’t use iCloud Photos?
2 Likes
Thats fair. I do see Show Featured Content and it’s On. Half of my point was… how useful is the feature if it’s only for the photos that happen to be on the phone? Also that an article like this might get into where the photos are pulled from. I realize that there’s nothing in how it’s described by Apple mentions that… again Apple just assumes everyone is use iCloud photos so why would they mention it? This is why I read TidBits, to gain these extra insights that aren’t in the official Apple marketing. As I said, I have it turned on but never felt it did much for me, but that could certainly be a result of the limited range of photos that are on my phone, IF the feature in fact does not look at photos that are stored in iCloud.
I’m not sure I fully understand the issue. It doesn’t require iCloud Photos (Apple retired the iCloud Photo Library name a while ago, confusingly enough) and both features rely on photos stored on your device because Apple doesn’t pull photos from other sources except iCloud Photos, which are technically “local” even if stored optimized. So it seems like the feature works without a cloud requirement and as expected!
1 Like
Gushing about how Apple has “cracked the code” may seem more true for people using iCloud Photos, I guess.