Make a Screen Saver Out of Your Own Images in Mac OS X

Do you have a collection of images and photos that you’d like to become a screen saver on the Mac? This offers a simple and nice way to customize a screen saver to include only your own images and pictures, and it’s quite easy to accomplish in macOS and Mac OS X.

You can make a nice screensaver out of a collection of your own images within Mac OS X very easily, the only requirements are having a folder containing the photos you want to use as the screensaver, then configuring the screen saver. This is quite easy, here are the steps:

How to Make a Screen Saver with Any Pictures on Mac

1. Create a new folder in the Finder, let’s call it ‘My ScreenSaver’
2. Gather images from your photo albums and drop them into ‘My Screensaver’ folder
3. Launch System Preferences from the  Apple menu
4. Click on Desktop & Screensaver
5. Click the Screensaver tab, then click on a type of image screen saver, for example Origami or Slideshow or “Ken Burns”
6. Click the “Source” sub menu” (for older MacOS versions, select the + button near the bottom of the screensaver list)
7. Select “Add Folder of Pictures”
8. Navigate to the “My ScreenSaver” pictures folder you created earlier
9. That’s it!

You can now select various effects for the screensaver by clicking the tiled icons and Options, to determine how the images are displayed, if they’re faded in and out, cropped, etc.

Newer versions of Mac OS X have separated a wide variety of new options into completely different screen savers, choosing a source folder will stay consistent across choice as you test the slideshow effect.

In modern Mac OS versions, you have even more display options to choose from, as you can turn any of the built-in “Slideshow” screen savers into something featuring your own pictures just by clicking the “Source” menu and selecting a folder, as shown in this screenshot:

This process of making your own screensaver is even easier if you use the Photos app or iPhoto, because iPhoto and Photos app both automatically hooks up to the ScreenSaver preference pane, you simply select the photo album you want displayed and the rest is the same.

For those who are on older Mac versions, adding the image folder to the screen saver is done through the bottom of the screen saver list. This is different from the newer versions of Mac software where the screen saver source is chosen in the image screen saver itself.

If you know of a different or better way to use a collection of your own pictures as a screen saver on the Mac, share with us in the comments below!

Updated: 3/1/2019