iPhoto '11: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Screensavers, AppleScript, and Automator

You’ve assembled libraries of digital images, sent heart-touching moments to friends and family via email, published your recent vacation pics on the Web, authored a QuickTime movie or two, and even boosted the stock price of Canon and Epson single-handedly through your consumption of inkjet printer cartridges. What more could there be?

Plenty. This chapter covers iPhoto’s final repertoire of photo stunts, like turning your photos into one of the best screensavers that’s ever floated across a computer monitor, plastering one particularly delicious shot across your desktop, calling upon AppleScript to automate photo-related chores for you, and harnessing iPhoto’s partnership with Automator. (This chapter’s alternate title: “Miscellaneous iPhoto Stunts that Didn’t Really Fit in the Outline.”)

Building a Custom Screensaver

Mac OS X’s screensaver feature is so good, it’s pushed more than one Windows person over the edge into making the switch to Mac OS X. When this screensaver 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 out, smoothly dissolving from one to the next.

Mac OS X comes equipped with a few photo collections that look great with this treatment: ...