Maria’s Guides

A very cool screen saver for folks with a lot of photos stored on their Macs.

One of the very cool and almost hidden features of Mac OS X 10.5’s improved screen saver is the photo mosaic screen saver module. This screen saver tells your computer to use all of the photos stored on it to create mosaic images of photos stored in a specific folder or an iPhoto event or album.

If that description doesn’t really help you visualize what this screen saver is doing, this post includes a video that not only shows you how to set it up, but it shows you the screen saver in action.

Keep in mind that the mosaic screen saver works best if you have a lot of photos in your iPhoto file.

Setting It Up

Here are the step-by-step instructions for setting up this screen saver on your Mac. These instructions are repeated in the video, but you might want to read through them quickly to get an idea of what to expect.

1. Choose Apple > System Preferences.
2. In the System Preferences window that appears, click the Desktop & Screen Saver Icon.
3. In the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences pane, click the Screen Saver button.
4. In the Screen Savers list on the left side of the window, scroll down to the Pictures list and select one of the picture folders, iPhoto events, or iPhoto albums in the list. This will be the folder full of images that are created with the mosaic tiles.
5. Under the Preview area, click the Mosaic Display Style button.
   
6. Click the Options button and use the dialog sheet that appears to set options, including whether slides should be presented in a random order, how many rows of mosaic tiles should make up the image, and the speed at which the mosaic image should be built. Click OK to save your settings.
7. Set screen saver Start options as desired, using the slider in the main Screen Saver window.
8. To see what your screen saver will look like on a full screen, click Test. (You can press Esc when you’re finished previewing.
9. Click the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences window to save your settings.

Seeing It In Action

Okay, here’s my home movie of the setup process, as well as a full-screen test with a number of images. To keep the video small, I downsized my computer display’s resolution. You’ll need QuickTime installed on your computer to see this video.

Two quick notes about this video:

• To make the file size smaller, I’ve set the screen rate a bit low for this. As a result, the screen saver’s transition appear a bit jerky. When you use the screen saver, you’ll see that the transitions are actually quite smooth.
• This is a 17 MB file. The quickTime controller may not appear immediately after you click, especially if you have a slow connection to the Internet.

[Note: I removed the full-size video I'd linked to here in addition to showing the movie above. It was choking at least one offline RSS reader with its 72+ MB size.]

Page References

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide includes more information about related topics:

• Screen Saver, pages 166-169
• Using System Preferences Panes, pages 547-549
• Preview, pages 304-308

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