Old "Saved Profile" wallpapers no longer work because "unable to identify your monitors"

[Rule34.xxx]

I have some saved wallpaper profiles that no longer work and won't display. It was stated that wallpaper engine cannot properly identify my monitors. I only have a single monitor, being the laptop screen itself. It was recommended for me to change the "Monitor Identification" to "Layout" but that breaks every saved wallpaper I have, both new and old. I can save a new wallpaper to a "saved profile" and it will load fine using "Device Path" for monitor identification, however, my older saved profiles do not work at all. Using "Layout" breaks both old and new saved profiles. None work with using that setting. Not sure to post this in general or problem solving. My apologies.

[Rule34.xxx]

I don't know if there is a way to save the data of the older saved profiles because I do not remember the details about the wallpapers, I cannot simply look them up, delete the old saved profile, unsubscribe and resubscribe, then create a new saved profile. I don't know how I would do that without knowing the wallpaper post details. Also, is there a way to prevent further saved profiles from breaking? Apologies, don't know how to edit a post to include this information to the original post.

[Biohazard]

If you have recently updated the graphics driver then you can try restarting the laptop and it should return everything. Graphics driver updates seem to sometimes change the monitor identification and therefore Wallpaper Engine will think it's a different monitor.

If your computer really permanently changed the monitor identification for some reason, then this shouldn't have happened at all, but unfortunately it id. We have implemented every single method of listing monitors in Wallpaper Engine and sadly every single one of them does not work reliably on 100% of computers, this is unfortunately the situation with Windows, the default one is the one that works best on most systems and behaves the way that is expected for situations where monitors are added or removed.

If Windows can't be trusted to return the same monitors, then the "layout" option will ignore whatever Windows returns and make up its own identification. But saved profiles and settings are attached to whatever monitor was identified before and they won't automatically transfer.

The configuration of Wallpaper Engine can be edited with a text editor (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\wallpaper_engine\config.json), so you could close Wallpaper Engine completely and use "replace all" to move your old settings to the new identification. You would have to find the old monitor identification that was previously correct, then replace it with "MonitorPositionL0T0" which is the identification for the first monitor when "layout" is used.

[Rule34.xxx]

"The configuration of Wallpaper Engine can be edited with a text editor (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\wallpaper_engine\config.json), so you could close Wallpaper Engine completely and use "replace all" to move your old settings to the new identification. You would have to find the old monitor identification that was previously correct, then replace it with "MonitorPositionL0T0" which is the identification for the first monitor when "layout" is used."

Might I be able to get some further details about how to do this? I get i can probably edit it with something like notepad, but I'm not really sure how I would do the "replace all" and what follows after that. Is there a way to edit the monitor position to be "device path" instead for the old files? I know device path works with new saved profiles but the "layout" format did not work with new saved profiles.

In short, i'm not really sure how to preform a permanent fix, and that is what I am mostly looking for here, instead of having to manually edit both all old and possible new saved profiles from what it sounds like?

[Biohazard]

Yes, you can use Notepad or Wordpad and use "replace" from the edit menu, which will then have a button for "replace all".

The issue is that you would need to find the original monitor identification in the config that you want to replace, it looks something like this: //?/DISPLAY#AUS32B4#5&319c3533&0&UID135430#{e6f07b5f-ee97-4a90-b076-33f57bf4eaa7}

You will now likely have two of them. One that was being used all this time until recently, when it suddenly changed. Ideally you would only change the one that was being used by Windows for all this time until the issue started.

If you check the file and search for something that looks like this, it should be repeated very often at the end of the file. Every time settings for a wallpaper are changed, an entry is added for this, so this should make it possible to find by going to the end of the file and searching upwards.

Try replacing this identifier with MonitorPositionL0T0 and then use the "layout" option in Wallpaper Engine. Make sure to only edit the file while Wallpaper Engine is closed, or it won't be recognized.