Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Posted: 02 Dec 2009 03:17 AM PST

Screen savers have long been a popular application with Windows computers. Whether is it a series of bouncing lines on your monitor, a slide show of digital images, or even the default Windows logo; screen savers have been in use dating back to Windows 95. Every year screen savers with greater graphical display ability and complexity find their way on to people’s computers.

There are screen saver software packages available on the Internet, which can combine different type of screen savers into one program. Instead of downloading an individual screen saver, the program allows for a variety of combinations. One such program, that deals with digital photos, is called Amaze (found here).

Amaze is billed as being able to work with any digital image format as well as digital video. Though you have the ability with Windows to setup your own photo slide show for a screen saver, you can do more with Amaze when it comes to digital media. Although setup for an Amaze based photo screen saver requires more steps than the Windows iteration, you have more control on how the photos are displayed.

Let’s say we want to create a “piled” photo type screen saver, where it appears that you are leafing through images and tossing them into a pile. When you open up Amaze, you have a tabbed menu list (Display, Files, Music, Other) on the left hand side of the window. We will start with the Display tab.

First we select the Photo Pile Effect. You may turn off the Full Screen Display option if you rather the screen saver appear at a reduced size. Click on the Settings button if you want to change any initial options with the Photo Pile Effect choice.

Within the Settings area, you have a handful of attributes you can edit. You may alter the display proportion of the images themselves and set the image rotation (the angle that the photos “land” on your display). You can let Amaze know how many, if any, to show up in black and white, instead of full color; as well as use something for the background image instead of the default black color.

Once you completed your journey through the Display tab, click on the Files tab. Here you will let Amaze know the source of your images. By default, the target is your My Pictures folder. If you have several folders within My Pictures you want to include, you can simply check “Include sub-folders”.

You may or may not want to add background music to this screen saver. Keep in mind that the more you add, the more system resources Amaze will require to run properly. That said, if you do want music, the Music tab will be your next stop. Amaze defaults to its own folder for a music track. You can edit the play list if desired though.

Lastly, the Other tab contains additional options for your screen saver setup. On the left hand side of the Other tab, you can let Amaze know how long you want to show each image, and in normal order or random. Normal order means that Amaze will look for photos in the root My Pictures folder before looking in sub-folders.

You may also choose to include text within your slide show. Selections to add captions are available in this set of options. On the right hand side of the Other tab we find more options for photos, video, and background colors. We can ignore the video options for now, but with photos we can make smaller photos full screen size and alter the display quality, if we so choose. Here is where you can edit the default background color, if you wanted to and did not choose a texture setting earlier.

At this point, you are ready to use your Amaze photo screen saver. This process may be more trouble than it is worth for the average person though. This software comes in at a price of $19.50, and this may be somewhat steep for a simple screen saver program. There are many other screen saver software titles available, but this one is at least worth a look if you are into digital image screen savers.

Copyright © 2007
Online Tech Tips.
Aseem Kishore (digitalfingerprint: a59a56dce36427d83e23b501579944fcakmk1980 (74.125.44.136) )

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Create Custom Screensavers using Amaze