Photo Screen Savers in Two Flavors: Windows and Macintosh

My husband and I recently got back from a Mediterranean cruise. We visited Rome, Monte Carlo, Florence, Naples, Santorini, Mykonos, Katakolon, Corfu, Kusadasi, and Venice. Since each place was more beautiful than the next, we ended up with over 800 digital photographs!

Now, I won't say that all of those photographs are worthy of being shared with friends and family (I can just imagine the yawns!), I did want the two of us to be able to see the pictures frequently and remember this incredible trip. So I decided to make the best of them into screen savers for both of our computers (one PC and one Macintosh).

I began by copying my most favorite pictures into a folder titled Favorite Pix for Screen Saver (you can name the folder anything you like). Then I used the Photoshop Elements batch resizing feature I wrote about in last month's article Processing or Renaming Files by the Batch, July 1, 2005 to resize all of the pictures to 480x640 pixels. (Why? Since I took all of my pictures at the best resolution possible for my camera, the pictures were way larger -- over 1MB each -- than they needed to be for decent screen saver resolution.) This shrunk most of the pictures down to 100 KB or less. Now the copies wouldn't take up too much space on my PC, and would be less bulky to copy to my husband's Macintosh computer as well.

Making a Windows XP Screen Saver

To create a screen saver slideshow in Windows XP, do the following:

1. Right-click on the desktop and choose Properties.
2. Click on the Screen Saver tab.
3. Choose My Pictures Slide Show from the Screen saver dropdown list.
4. Click on the Setting button.
5. Click on the Browse button next to the Use pictures in this folder heading, navigate to the folder containing the pictures you want to use in the screensaver and click on OK.
6. Change the other options (transitions, scrolling, etc.) in the My Pictures Screen Saver Options dialog box as needed and then click on OK.
7. Click on the Preview button to preview the screen saver, or click on the OK button to close the Display Properties dialog box.

That's all there is to it on the Windows side of things. Now I wanted to do the same thing on my husband's Macintosh computer. First, I zipped up my "Favorite Pix for Screen Saver" folder to make it as compact as possible and then I e-mailed it to my husband. He opened the e-mail, downloaded the zipped file to his Macintosh and expanded it using Stuffit Expander. (I could have transferred the images to his computer by copying them to a CD, but I didn't have any blank ones at the moment.)

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