KuraFire Network

Here's one for Mac users. It's dead easy, it's dead obvious, but chances are you've never thought about doing this (I'm sure plenty of you have, so those of you can just ignore all this). Flickr exports RSS feeds for photo streams of almost any kind; iPhoto 6 offers Photocasts, for feeds containing pictures; Mac OS X allows you to specify a folder or Photocast from iPhoto as screen saver. With only very little work, you can have a screen saver showing the photo stream of your choice - no plugins or anything required, providing you have iPhoto 6. Let me show you how.

First, find a Flickr stream of your liking. This can be a person's Flickr stream (including your own), a stream of all public photos for a specific tag, a group's photo stream, your friends' most recent pictures, pretty much any type of photo stream available on Flickr. Let's use the feed for the Interestingness tag in this example.

When you've selected your stream, look at the bottom of the page for the Feed icon:

Copy the link location of the feed (right-click, Copy Link) and open iPhoto. In iPhoto, go to File > Subscribe to Photocast:

Paste the URL of the Flickr feed in the field:

You now have a Photocast of that Flickr stream, and it'll be loading in pictures at this point. As iPhoto's Photocast setting is set by default to update once a day, you may want to switch it to update once an hour: Flickr streams tend to be quite active and this will keep things fresh and interesting throughout each day! Go to iPhoto > Preferences... and choose the Photocasts tab, then set it to update Every hour:

Now go to your System Preferences > Desktop & Screen saver, and in the Screen saver tab choose the "Interestingness - Everyone" Photocast:

And there you go! Just a few very quick, simple steps and you now have a screen saver of your Flickr stream of choice. Enjoy!

Hat tip to Mac Tips Daily - I simply took it further and did my own writeup because a) I wanted to share this with more people and b) linking to it in my sidebar isn't much use since there is no feed for that.

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