Visigami - Free image search and screen saver for Mac

Posted on May 1, 2008 at 4:24 am

I have a tendency to only write about Windows software, probably because I use only Windows! However, there are lots of Mac people out there and they are growing in numbers! So when I saw a post on the Google Mac Blog about a new image search and screen saver app, I thought I would write up a quick post for the Maccies!

Visigami is an open-source app written by a Google employee that spices up your search for images on the web. It’s actually similar to another program I had written about earlier called PicLens, which is actually a browser plugin that turns your boring image search into a fancy looking animated gallery!

Visigami is pretty simple: it’s an image search app and a screen saver creator. Type in a search term at the top left and press Enter! Visigami can search from three different image sources: Google Images, Picasa, and Flickr.

Your pictures will now load up in a pretty looking animated way on the screen. You can animate the pictures in a couple of ways: fan, carousel, and grid. You can also change the camera views to fixed, autopan, and mouse pan.

Finally, you can adjust the spacing, the speed that they fly in, and the zoom level of the pictures via the slide bars across the top. It’s actually a pretty nifty application that I wish was written for Windows also!

The cool thing is you can search for pictures, adjust the settings to exactly what you want, and then create a screen saver that looks exactly the same with the pictures from the web! Sweet!

You can use your mouse’s scroll wheel to zoom in and out and while in “mouse-pan” mode, you can click on a image and hold the Option key down to move the images with the mouse.

Be aware that all the flipping and zooming and flying around will take up a good amount of your processor also! Only use it if you have a decently fast machine with a pretty good graphics card!

Enjoy Mac users! Any other cool programs out there like this for Windows, anyone know?

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