MacOS has much to offer any user, but it doesn’t come with a lot in terms of screen savers. And that has rankled an Apple redditor who expressed his dismay in a recent discussion thread.
I’ll share my thoughts on MacOS screen savers below, but here’s the post from redditor Mrcruncher:
The built in screen saver’s are old and quite poor. For example the photos screen saver keeps ‘forgetting’ to use my photos and goes back to defaults.
Are there any good non-apple screen savers?
His fellow redditors responded with their thoughts and had some good suggestions for MacOS screen savers:
FoferJ: “There are tons of them out there. Here’s a good one:
https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial”
Wolverineoflove: “http://www.electricsheep.org”
Christopherness: “My favorite is called lotsawater; a very realistic water droplets screensaver.
There are also a ton of really good ones here: https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/”
Terinjokes: “Here’s a few I use:
Countdown by soffes
Clock.saver by soffes
XScreenSavers by jwz
RandomExtra to pick which screen savers to randomly select, and to allow different screen savers per screen.
If we find (or make) more, we should definitely add them to the Awesome OS X Screen savers GitHub repo.”
MacintoshLover: “Plasma is my personal favorite. Check it out.”
Sephinator: “Saver Screensson is pretty awesome.”
NAME: “This flip clock one is pretty nice: http://fliqlo.com/”
FoferJ: “Some more here: http://uselesscreations.com/wp/?page_id=151”
What I use for screen savers on my 5K iMac
When I first got my 5K iMac, I wanted to get some high resolution wallpapers that worked on its 27-inch screen. So I went looking around and found some great ones at sites like these:
Now what do wallpapers have to do with screen savers?
Well, I like to use the wallpaper images in MacOS’ default screen savers. I simply use the folders that I have the wallpapers in as the source for the screen savers. So I see amazing photos of animals, landscapes and even images of outer space move across my 5K iMac’s screen.
Here’s one of the neat animal images that appear in my screen savers:
Once you’ve downloaded your images, just open the Settings app then click on Desktop & Screen Saver. From there you can choose your screen saver option and the folder to use as the source for your images.
Apple offers a number of different options to have images displayed in screen savers:
Floating
Flip-up
Reflections
Origami
Shifting Tiles
Sliding Panels
Photo Mobile
Holiday Mobile
Vintage Prints
Photo Wall
Ken Burns
Classic
I know that not everybody wants screen savers that use images like I do, but I really enjoy seeing photos of animals, landscapes and outer space appear in my screen savers. I never know which ones will show up so it’s always a treat to see them appear on my screen.
MacOS has plenty of screen savers
As you can tell from the links in the comments from Reddit, and my own commentary, there are plenty of screen savers available for Macs. You just know where to look to find them.
And if the links I’ve included here don’t have screen savers of interest for you, be sure to open the Mac App Store and do a quick search for screen savers. There are plenty of them available to download right in the Mac App Store.
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