You’ve got an album of 40 favorite photos and you want a fresh one on your lock screen every morning, but the built-in Photos shuffle keeps serving the same three pictures. This shortcut pulls a random image from an album you pick and refuses to reuse any of them until the whole album has had its turn.

Inside the shortcut

You point it at one Photos album, and each time it runs it grabs an image you haven’t seen yet and sets it as your wallpaper. It tracks which photos have already been used, so the rotation works through every picture before it loops back to the start. When it does start over, it checks the last one it picked and avoids repeating it twice in a row, which is the little detail most random-wallpaper shortcuts miss. Run it by hand whenever you want a change, or hand it to an automation and forget about it.

Adding it to your iPhone

Press Add Shortcut on this page to load it in the Shortcuts app.
Scroll the preview to the bottom and tap Add Shortcut to confirm.
Run it once from the Shortcuts grid and pick the album you want to draw from.
Grant the photo-access prompt when it appears so the shortcut can read that album.

Setting it on a schedule

Running it manually is fine, but the point is to never think about it again. A Personal Automation handles that. The trick worth knowing: a time-based automation will only fire silently if you turn off the confirmation prompt, otherwise iOS just shows you a notification and waits.

In Shortcuts, open the Automation tab and tap the +.
Choose Time of Day, set your hour, and pick Daily, Weekly, or Monthly under Repeat.
Add a Run Shortcut action and select this one.
Turn off Ask Before Running so the wallpaper changes without a tap.

Tweaking it to your taste

The album is the main lever here. Build a dedicated album of wallpapers you actually like and the rotation stays sharp; dump your whole camera roll in and you’ll get the occasional blurry receipt photo on your lock screen. You can also change how often it runs by editing the automation’s repeat interval, and nothing stops you from keeping a Home Screen widget or the manual shortcut around for when you want to skip ahead early.

When something goes sideways

It crashes the moment it runs. That’s the known iOS 18.0 bug. Updating to iOS 18.1 or later clears it; the author flagged this directly.

It keeps asking for photo permission. Depending on how the album is set up, iOS may prompt more than once. Grant access each time and choose the album-wide option when offered.

The wallpaper doesn’t actually change. The system Set Wallpaper action has been flaky on some builds even after the 18.0 fix, something the author noted too. Re-running it usually takes, and an iOS update may smooth it out.

Quick answers

Do I have to install anything besides the shortcut?

Nothing else to download — it runs entirely on the built-in Shortcuts and Photos apps, so once it’s added you’re done.

Will it ever show me the same photo two days running?

That’s the whole point of the “no repeats” part. It won’t reuse a photo until the album is exhausted, and even at the wraparound it skips whatever it just used so you don’t get a back-to-back duplicate.

Can I point it at more than one album?

It’s built around a single album you choose on first run. If you want a bigger pool, the cleaner fix is to gather everything into one wallpaper album and aim the shortcut at that.

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