How to Create a Desktop Slideshow

  Matt Cone       March 8, 2007      Tutorials Mac


If you’re like us, you love browsing and collecting nice desktop pictures. There are literally thousands of websites that provide free desktop pictures. Anybody can download one of these works of art and set it as their desktop. And, if you have a digital camera and use iPhoto, you can set one of your own photos as your desktop picture.

The problem is that you only have one desktop, and having one desktop means you can only display one desktop picture at a time. (Unless you have two displays connected to your Mac. Most of us aren’t so fortunate!) But don’t worry: there is a way to shuffle through all of your desktop pictures and photos stored in iPhoto. We’ll show you how to make these pictures change automatically over a certain period of time - like a slideshow! Here’s how:

  1. Locate the images you would like to place on your desktop and store them in one folder. Our folder’s name is going to be “Gallery.”

    Creating a desktop slide show with a Mac

    As you can see, our folder has 130 images. We want to be able to see them all from time to time!

  2. From the Apple menu, select System Preferences. Then select Desktop & Screen Saver.

    Creating a desktop slide show with a Mac

    In this window, we have several images to choose from, but what we’re looking for is the folder with our desktop pictures. From the list of folders, select Choose Folder. Browse for your folder full of desktop pictures and select it.

  3. Now the window displays the desktop pictures we have inside our folder. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see the “Change picture” checkbox.

    Creating a desktop slide show with a Mac

    Check the box and choose a time. This is the period of time the image will stay on your desktop before it changes into another. Check the Random order checkbox to shuffle through your images.

    Creating a desktop slide show with a Mac

Now kick back and watch your desktop change from time to time!

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