Personalizing

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a great <insert holiday of choice> or at least a good few vacation days before barreling headlong into the new year.  At the end of the year, I always find that I wind up left with tons of photos that I love seeing but seldom take the time to page through my iPhoto library or other photo archives to relive all of the special moments.

A couple great ways to catch a bit of nostalgia in your everyday life are buried in the OS X Desktops and Screen Savers.  By opening the System Preferences panel and clicking “Desktop and Screen Saver” you can choose from many built-in or customizable options.

The Desktop tab will allow you to choose from many Apple-selected desktop images, or even choose photos from your Pictures Folder or iPhoto albums!  (If you are using iPhoto ‘08, and have Events set up, you can also select a particular Event)

If you can’t decide which image is your favorite, you can choose a folder or album and use the controls at the bottom of the panel to have the photos cycle through on a schedule you set. This way you can see a new Desktop image every 30 minutes, every time you reboot, etc.

Another fun place to view your photos (or personalize your computer another way) is on the screen saver.  In this System Preferences tab,  you can once again choose from a myriad of Apple-created screensavers from simple changing colors, to sunny beach scenes, to a news RSS feed and even your own photos.

As with the Desktop Image settings, you can choose your Pictures Folder or iPhoto albums and events.  In this mode, you can even choose several different ways for your photos to be displayed (this will vary slightly between versions of OS X.  Leopard has a slideshow, “falling prints” and a mosaic maker while Tiger had some different display options.