Applies to these editions of Windows Vista:

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Use pictures as your screen saver

You can create a personalized screen saver by displaying selected pictures and videos as a slide show when you are not actively using your computer.

  1. Open Screen Saver Settings by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, clicking Personalization, and then clicking Screen Saver.

  2. Click the Screen saver list, and then click Photos.

  3. If you want to specify a location for the pictures you want to use in your screen saver, modify the slide show speed, or configure any other screen saver settings, click Settings. After you make your changes, click Save.

  4. Click OK.

Show all

If you don't make any changes to the screen saver settings, Windows will show all the pictures and videos stored in Windows Photo Gallery. If you want to customize the screen saver, you can click Settings in the Screen Saver Settings dialog box, and then do any of the following:

To

Do this

Show only pictures and videos with a particular tag

Type the tag in the With this tag box that is associated with the pictures you want to show in the screen saver. You can enter multiple tags separated by semicolons.

Show only pictures and videos with a particular rating

Click the With this rating or higher list, and then click a star rating.

Notes

Notes

  • If you don't rate any of your pictures and videos in Photo Gallery, the screen saver will not show any of them.

  • The screen saver combines tags and ratings when it looks for pictures and videos to show. For example, if you enter a tag called "Flowers" and a rating of three stars, the screen saver will only show three-star pictures that are tagged "Flowers."

Prevent certain pictures or videos from appearing in the screen saver

Select the Don't show items tagged check box and enter the name of a tag assigned to pictures that you want to keep out of your screen saver.

Note

Note

If you don't want certain pictures and videos to appear in your screen saver, you must first apply this tag to them in Photo Gallery.

Apply a slide show theme to your screen saver

Click the Use this theme list, and then click the theme you want to use.

Notes

Notes

  • You can apply any of several themes to your screen saver to display the pictures and videos in different ways. Some themes fill the screen with one picture at a time, while other themes arrange several on screen at once.

  • Not all slide show themes will work with all computers. If the screen saver can't run with a selected theme, it usually means that your computer's video card is not powerful enough to support the theme.

Play your pictures and videos in random order

Select the Shuffle contents check box.

In order to see your screen saver with high-quality visuals (including themes and transitions), you need to have a subscore of 3.0 for the Graphics category in the Windows Experience Index. Some themes also require your computer’s graphics card to have a feature called Vertex Shader 2.0. To take advantage of all slide show capabilities, you might need to upgrade to a more powerful graphics card. For more information, see Ways to improve your computer's performance.

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