iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Building a Custom Screen Saver

Mac OS X’s screen saver feature is so good, it’s been the deciding factor responsible for pushing more than one Mac fan over the edge into making the upgrade to Mac OS X. When this screen saver kicks in (after several minutes of inactivity on your part), your Mac’s screen becomes a personal movie theater. The effect is something like a slideshow, except that the pictures don’t simply appear one after another and sit there on the screen. Instead, they’re much more animated. They slide gently across the screen, zooming in or zooming out, smoothly dissolving from one to the next.

Mac OS X comes equipped with a few photo collections that look great with this treatment: forests, space shots, and so on. But let the rabble use those canned screen savers. You, a digital master, can use your own photos as screen saver material.

Meet the Screen Saver

When you’re ready to turn one of your own photo collections into a screen saver, collect the photos in an album (Chapter 7). Or, if you’re using Mac OS X 10.3 or later, simply highlight the photos you want to use as screen saver fodder, whether they’re in an album or not.

Then, in Organize mode, click the album to highlight it, and then click the Desktop icon on the bottom panel.

• If you’re using Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), the dialog box shown at top in Figure 11-16 appears. Click OK.

• If you’re using Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), you go straight to the Desktop & Screen Saver panel of System Preferences (shown at bottom in Figure ...