Filed under: Leopard
In praise of the Leopard mosaic photo screensaver
[For everyone who wanted a video of this screensaver, here you go.]
It was important enough to make the 'Sparta' list, but I hadn't checked out the new mosaic mode for photo screensavers in Leopard until today -- and now I'm wondering where this has been all my life. An infinite outward zoom, creating a Photomosaic-like image that you half-squint to recognize, until... whoomp! It resolves into a picture of one of your pets/kids/scenic byways. Absolutely hypnotic, to the point that when you finally look away the screen still appears to grow and swell for a few seconds more. Put it on a big screen or HDTV and it's a conversation stopper.
Some years ago, when I was working at LIFE, the cover image for the 60th anniversary issue of the magazine was a photomosaic of Marilyn Monroe, produced by Robert Silvers of MIT. LIFE paid Silvers a steep fee to produce the image, and now we have similar capabilities in a screensaver. We truly are living in the future.
Update: Comments hint that you may not be able to run this screensaver unless you have iPhoto '08 installed; if you discover otherwise let us know.
Thanks Rich
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
JosephMohmed said 10:05AM on 12-14-2007
When I use this screen saver there's always a loadbar in the middle of the screen that doesn't go away. Anybody else having this problem?
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Joe said 8:37AM on 11-12-2007
Macbook + 24" monitor + lots of RAW = so slow and coppy it's useless.
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Joshua said 8:40AM on 11-12-2007
Constantly crashes for me so I don't use it.
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Thom Jensen said 8:58AM on 11-12-2007
This screensaver is very sweet. I have about 10,000 3 meg. photos in my library and the random production of the mosaic is amazing. I am using a G5 iMac with 20" screen.
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Frank Furter said 8:58AM on 11-12-2007
MacPro, 23" Cinema, works like a dream. Sorry to hear you folks don't know how to configure your system. Might check your processes, I had a rogue item that was once slowing mine down. Na na na na naaa na.
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marc cardwell said 9:35AM on 11-12-2007
crashes for me too on a brand new MBP 2.2. i can't even change it back to the first choice: the pics coming down at random. i'm kind of glad i'm not the only one it happens to.
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sam said 9:24AM on 11-12-2007
anyway to print this shiz out photo size? that would be awesome.
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marc cardwell said 9:36AM on 11-12-2007
follow up: i think it crashed because i hadn't used iphoto yet, so it had to ask where the library was. once i told it where the library was, and relaunched the screensaver, all is well.
hope this helps some one.
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marc cardwell said 9:56AM on 11-12-2007
follow up: i think it crashed because i hadn't used iphoto yet, so it had to ask where the library was. once i told it where the library was, and relaunched the screensaver, all is well.
hope this helps some one.
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BobbyW said 9:37AM on 11-12-2007
Mine only seems to pull from iPhoto instead of the Pictures folder I pointed it to. I only have a handful of pictures in iPhoto so it's not as good as I'd expect. I wonder why it's ignoring all my other photos?
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Sam said 9:54AM on 11-12-2007
b/c apple doesn't love you.
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DrWho said 10:21AM on 11-12-2007
Cosmic!
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Yozo said 10:04AM on 11-12-2007
I love this feature and was wondering if there was anyway to capture this as a quicktime movie. I'd love to be able to use this in an iMovie project for my in-laws 40th Anniversary video. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
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peter said 6:07AM on 11-14-2007
"crashes for me too on a brand new MBP 2.2. i can't even change it back to the first choice: the pics coming down at random."
i have the same problem, but i dont have iphoto (dont like it) so there is no way to change the option to the first mode, every time i try it system-utilities crashes. so their is no photo screensaver for me. very bad.
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Tiffany said 6:47PM on 12-31-2007
This is kinda late, but if you haven't figured out how to fix it yet, go to ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost and trash all of the plist files that start with com.apple.screensaver, as well as the plist file that starts with com.apple.systempreferences (~ = your home folder). This will reset the screen savers preference pane and allow you to change it.
John Laur said 5:13PM on 11-12-2007
Wow, I wonder how long it would have taken me to find this if I hadn't read about it here....
I have about 12,000 6MP photos in my library and I expected this thing to run like a dog on my PowerBook G4. After the first startup (which took about 1 minute) it runs smooth as butter. With the speed and size cranked to maximum you occasionally see it replace a texture or two during the zoom out that I assume is because it can't read them off the hard drive fast enough.
Amazing.
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Mitch said 10:25AM on 11-12-2007
This is very cool as is the Collage screensaver.
I never would have predicted that Screensavers are part of the reason I like Leopard. Go Figure.
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christapher said 1:21PM on 11-12-2007
15"mbp and i love it! though it is pretty sad that my screen saver kicks on my cooling fans
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Dennis Bates said 12:06PM on 11-12-2007
Works great on my 1 year old MacBook. I suspect that the fact that I have nearly 3500 pics in my iPhoto library may make the whole process a little easier. This is definitely a WOW feature to show off to the uninitiated. The fact that this was an "also ran" new feature makes it all the more impressive. No it won't change the world but it sure is cool.
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Nüle said 11:54AM on 11-12-2007
Yes, this is future!
But...also a bit of past. There is the ScreenSaver "ImagePuzzle" which is
very fine
Keep on going foreward!
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