mountain lion screen saver folders

I am INCENSED that Apple have removed the facility to have folders within folders of photos as one's screensaver. What on earth are they thinking about?

Probably Apple didn't mean to do that. Hopefully, they are already aware of this issue in order to fix it the soonest possible.

Add my name to this. A bit annoyed with this. Hopfully loukandr is right and this is just an oversight.

Yesterday, I answered a question on how to access a sub-folder through screensaver preferences. The key is to only click once, to high-light the desired sub-folder, then click choose. The sub-folder images will begin to display in the small preview window. Also make certain you have not inadvertently chosen a Start After time of "Never."

System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Source: > Choose Folder ...

This feature works on Lion, ML, and ML 10.8.1.

The "space" bar works as follows:

Mouse over the screensaver preview screen in the above preference panel. Click to select it. Now, the screensaver is full-screen. Hit the "Space" bar once. The screensaver disappears. Hit the "Space" bar again once, and the screensaver reappears. I also set the Start after to 1 Minute, to allow a normal screensaver appearance. Hit the "Space" bar once, and the desktop reappears. Hit the "Space" bar again, and the screensaver reappears.

Ok. I understand now. Mountain Lion has removed folder recursion and space bar pause of screensaver. The two capabilities that I never used in Lion! Had to reboot freshly installed 10.7.4 and build proper folder structure to verify your valid point.

Drove up my frustration level with the following steps on ML, and decided that Apple OS X engineering outcoded themselves in Mountain Lion.

1. I backed up the current desktop screen saver preferences pane and replaced it with one from Lion. Nope.
2. In a similar manner, I also copied the Lion random.saver to my ~/Library/Screen Savers folder. Nope.
3. Explored PreferencePane for screensaver with Xcode. Nope.
4. Checked defaults read of two screensaver preference *.plist files with Xcode. Nope.

At this time, I do not see a user intervention fix for this issue, unless the functionality was compartmentalized to an iPhoto library, which in my opinion would have been a myopic end usability decision.

I just wanted to add my vote to the discussion here. I hope Apple is listening. Though some may look at it as a trivial matter, I am AMAZED at how much I miss that pause function. I noticed it immediately, and have patiently been awaiting a fix, but I don't know if one is coming. I understand the downgrade might have been accidental, but certainly a fix is possible...

Angelo -B wrote:

I hope Apple is listening.

Apple does not pay attention to these forums. These forums are for user-to-user support. If you have something to say to apple, click here.

I agree this is a mess. While I haven't been able to figure out a GOOD workaound, I do want to tell you about something you can do if you're so inclined: use symbolic links (also called symlinks). These are similar to aliases but the difference is that whereas the Mountain Lion screen saver ignore aliases, it works with symlinks (in the right circumstances; I'll explain more below). Also, symlinks are vastly smaller than aliases (why the heck are aliases so dang big?!?) which at the scale we're talking about here might actually make a difference.

Symlinks can be created with Terminal and if you Google you'll find more information on this. But I recommend making your life easy and using SymbolicLinker. I'm going to go into more details about how to make this work in a moment but before I do I need to expound on my comments above about the Mountain Lion screen saver symlinks working "in the right circumstances." As well as I can tell, the Mountain Lion screen saver will work with symlinked files that have names that appear to be image names. In other words, if a file has a name like "myimage.jpg" (without the quotes of course) and it's actually a symlink, the Mountain Lion screen saver will work with it (and again, this is NOT true for an alias: I have found that the Mountain Lion screen saver won't work with an alias named something like "myimage.jpg" nor will it work with any other aliases). However, I've found that if the file has a name that does not appear to be an image--such as "myimage.jpg symlink"--then it will not work. And names like "myimage.jpg symlink" are exactly what are produced by SymbolicLinker. So you'll need to change the names of these symlinks before the Mountain Lion screen saver will work with them. And for that, I recommend NameChanger.

Okay, so here are the steps:

1. Create a directory to which you will point the Mountain Lion screen saver (to keep things clean, this should be something other than Pictures and it should be used only for this purpose but it's up to you; I recommend creating a directory called "Screen Saver" inside your Pictures directory).
2. Go to one of the directories with photos you want to use with the Mountain Lion screen saver and select all the photos you want to use with the screen saver, right-click, and choose Make Symbolic Link.
3. Sort the finder window by Kind and select all the items of type Alias (Mac OS X dubs your symlinks aliases but remember, they're actually symlinks, not aliases) and drag them to the directory you created in step 1.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for all other directories with photos you want to use with the Mountain Lion screen saver.
5. Open NameChanger.
6. Go to the directory you created in step 1, select all items, and drag them into NameChanger.
7. In NameChanger, type " symlink" (with the space, without the quotes) into the Original Text box. You'll see the file names in the Renamed Filenames column are changed to remove the " symlink" part.
8. Press Rename.
9. And finally, point the Mountain Lion screen saver at the directory you created in step 1.

Again, this isn't perfect: if you move the source files, the symlinks to those files will break and plus the procedure above can take a while to do, not to mention that you have to perform this procedure every time you want new pictures to be known to the Mountain Lion screen saver. The only way around that would be to create a utility that would watch a directory (such as the Pictures directory) and all its subdirectories and would perform the equivalent of the above steps (well, just 2 through 8 really) whenever a new picture was added. Unfortunately, I do not know of such a utility.

You could do this on the command-line side pretty easily. Create a directory for the symlinks (say, /Users/foobar/Documents/Screensaver), and then add the following to your crontab (crontab -e):

0 0 * * * cd /Users/foobar/Documents/Screensaver ; /usr/bin/find /Users/foobar/Pictures -name \*.jpg -exec ln -f -s {} \;

Then set the screensaver to use /Users/foobar/Documents/Screensaver. The cron job will run at midnight daily. (You can run the same thing from the command line to set it up initially).

This quick and dirty version is not perfect (it doesn't resolve file name conflicts, for example) but I just tested it and it works.

It is quite a mystifying removal of functionality.

Many thanks to both jladams97 and tomholub. Just to clarify: Do the steps above to create a folder of symlinks and point the screensaver to that new folder address the problem of PAUSING the screensaver? I did Tom's steps, but when the screensaver launches, the spacebar still ends the screensaver. Any thoughts? Thanks! --Angelo

No, it does nothing to address pausing the slide show.

Thanks jladams97.

That tedious workaround did the trick for subfolders.

I do hope this issue gets fixed, as the steps need repeating as photos are added and...

still no pause.

Left and right arrows do work for moving forward/backwards through slides, though.

This bug has finally been fixed in 10.8.3. I can confirm this and it's also noted by Apple in the list of Apple fixes for this update.

Still no pause function, however...