Using IrfanView to Make Screensavers
Introduction
In this tutorial, you will learn how to use IrfanView to make a screensaver for your computer. IrfanView makes it very easy to do, so lets get ready to go.
The Tutorial
Ok, first things first. Open up IrfanView. You don't need any images open, but it doesn't matter if one is opened.
Then, click on the slideshow button (shown below).
It will open up a new window that looks like this:
Now, that may look like a lot of things to go through, but don't worry. It is really simple. The first thing that you do is to navigate through the folder list on the top-right hand of the corner until you get to where your pictures are saved on the computer.
Then you select the ones that you want to add, and hit add. If you want to add all the pictures in the folder, just hit add all. You can then see previews in the little box that says preview images by single clicking on an image in the slideshow files box.
Once you have added all the pictures that you want to the slidshow, you can set up the options for how it plays. First, I would set the slide advancement to random after 7.0 seconds. That way, it is never the same way twice, and the pictures will be up long enough for you to see them.
Next, you should check the loop slideshow box, since that will let the screensaver keep running after all the pictures have gone through.
If you want to can add some text to the show text box. Those symbols are translated by the program to show different things as the screensaver plays. For example, by adding $E271 and $E272, the slideshow will show the make and the model of the camera at the top of each picture. Note that this will only work if you took the picture with a recent digital camera.
Once you have set up all the options the way you want them, click the save filenames as text, and save it to a file named screensaver in your my documents folder. That way, you can come back to this later and modify it.
When that is done, click on the save as exe/scr button. It will open up a window that looks like this
Make sure that Create SCR file and Play in full screen mode are selected. In the save result file to folder box, make sure that it is your windows folder. For most people it is c:\windows. If it isn't, just set it to what it should be. Name the result file name to whatever you want. Pictures works well. Finally hit create. It will then create the screensaver. It will take a while, so do something off the computer while it is running. When it is done, you can change your screensaver to your new one in the Screensaver tab of the Display Properties menu.