iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition

Chapter 13. Screen Savers, AppleScript, & Automator

You’ve assembled libraries of digital images, sent heart-touching moments to friends and family via email, published your recent vacation 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 screen savers that’s ever floated across a computer display, 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 Don’t Fit Into Any One Category.”)

Building a Custom Screen Saver

Mac OS X’s screen saver feature is so good, it’s pushed more than one Windows user over the edge into making the switch 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: ...