ArtSaver 2.1

If you are looking for a "slide show" or "picture flow" screensaver that offers you more control over the display than Apple's built-in screensaver, then ArtSaver might be right for you. It is mostly geared towards people who want to see their image collections (such as beautiful landscape shots or fine art) as large as possible, and with the info which images they are seeing.

Some of ArtSaver's options and features are the following:

• Keeps a persistent database of all the images found in the specified directory tree or iPhoto album, which allows you to display huge image databases.
• Use all images in a directory tree (minus the ones that are excluded by other options, see below), or all images in one of your iPhoto albums.
• You can review the previous images (cursor keys), pause the slide show (space bar), or have ArtSaver show the current one in Finder (return key).
• Options include:
  • the speed of the gradual zoom-in and out (Ken Burns effect);
  • the duration how long an image is displayed;
  • whether or not the path of the image should be displayed, too. (instead of the complete path, ArtSaver can also display just the filename.)
  • many many more ...
• You can specify constraints to exclude certain images.

ArtSaver 2.0 works under both Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard);

Installation: as usual, open the disk image (if your Mac hasn't done it for you), and double-click on ArtSaver.saver. Then go to System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Savers, select ArtSaver, and click the 'Options' button.

ArtSaver should work out-of-the box with its built-in defaults. However, in ArtSaver's Options pane you'll probably want to specify the directory where ArtSaver can find the images (default = ~/Pictures), and whether and how ArtSaver should display the image name. All other options in the other two sections probably work by default, but they are there if you need to change them.