Help me find an alternative to the default Mac screensaver?

July 2, 2012 4:28 PM

Mac photo screensaver: are there any simple and free alternatives available that don't automatically resize the images to fit the screen, and have more display options?

The default photo-slideshow screensaver for Macs is great if you have giant photos, but I am trying to display a folder of smaller pictures and there's no option to allow the photos to remain the same size, or for more than one to be presented at a time. Are there any free alternatives with more tweaking options out there? Preliminary googling has produced nothing that currently works on OSX 10.7.4 for me, but would anyone know better?

posted by ossian to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Huh - I don't think I've had this problem with my Mac screen saver... I wonder if I'm reading this wrong but....

If you go to system preferences --> Desktop&Screen saver there should be a pulldown menu.... it seems like the default is actual size but you can change that to fill the screen/stretch. Maybe select "center"?

I don't know about showing more than one at the same time - I know you can create a folder to shuffle through, but I'm not sure about having two pics show up randomly simultaneously.
posted by Lt. Bunny Wigglesworth at 5:07 PM on July 2, 2012

I'm going to blow your mind.

Go to System Preferences -> Desktop & Screensaver

Click on the Screen Saver tab

Click on the "+" sign at the bottom of the left column

Choose "Add Folder of Pictures"

Now you can select between 3 styles of presentation (including a collage), and also some more details in the options.
posted by Aquaman at 5:30 PM on July 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

(BTW you can also add RSS feeds (including Flickr feeds!) and MobileMe online galleries this way, too. This is different than the built-in RSS Visualizer screensaver.)
posted by Aquaman at 5:33 PM on July 2, 2012

Aquaman, I am more than aware...the problem is, there is no tweaking for allowing the photos to not be resized when they are displayed, or for other display options, such as displaying more than one photo at a time. What I have at the moment are smaller photos that are inflated automatically by the screensaver, so they look pixellated and ew. The 'snapshots falling on the screen' and the giant grid display options are not what I want either.
posted by ossian at 5:33 AM on July 3, 2012

I'd like to know the answer to this, too!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:38 PM on July 3, 2012