Updated Google Screensaver supports Picasa Web Albums and RSS feeds

Posted on March 29, 2007 at 12:54 pm

My screen saver just got so much better that now I think I’ll have to sit and use it to watch cool photos rather than as a nice view for passerby visitors while I’m away from my computer. Google has added support for Picasa Web Albums and for RSS feeds!

So now you get can photos onto your screen saver in three ways:

1. Your own computer (which is boring to say the least! You already seen your own pictures!)

2. Picasa Web Albums – You can now view pictures from the most recently updated albums from your Picasa account of a friends. You can now monitor anything new that comes into your buddies albums! If they create a new album, that album will show up on your screensaver.

3. RSS feeds – You can grab feeds from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, or from a whole range of professional photographers from here. The favorite RSS feed for a lot of people though is the Flickr Intertingness, which takes the best photos from around the world!

You can download the new Google Screensaver here. You have to install the Google Updater in order to get the Screensaver software. This is the easiest way and it’ll tell you when there are updates also.

If you already had Google Screensaver installed, you have to open the Updater software and go to the Updates tab to install the new update. Otherwise, if you keep trying to download it and you already have it installed, nothing will happen because it’s waiting for you to approve it.

Go to the Start Menu, click on Google Updater. Click on the Updates tab and click Install to install the new version.

Once it has been installed, it will ask you whether you want the Google Screensaver to be set as the default. Choose Yes.

Next, to configure the Screensaver, you need to right click on your desktop and go to Properties. Then click on the Screen Saver tab. You’ll see Google Screen Saver already selected in the drop down list.

Click Settings and you can now configure the three options we had talked about earlier: Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, Computer, or Photo feeds.

If you check the Picasa Web Albums box, you’ll get a dialog where you can then type in your login information and also check whether you want to get pictures from not only your recent uploads, but also from your contact’s recent updates (which is more fun!).

The fun feature is RSS feeds that you can pull from other sites such as Flickr, etc. Once you open an RSS feed from this site or the Flickr one listed above, you simply copy and paste that URL into the text box and click Done!