Screensaver = Memorysaver

One of the true joys I get out of photography is when my computer falls asleep and the screensaver kicks in.  I have it set to cycle through my My Pictures directory, and it’s absolutely wonderful.  I can get mesmerized just sitting there watching it.  I'll see pictures come up that I'll have forgotten I had.  It's a real joy.

I’ve learned a few things too.  Once when a picture came up on the screen, I sat impatiently wanting to see the next one-- what a great litmus test for whether or not I should delete that image.  The second lesson that I learned (and have been pondering for a while), is that there are a lot of images that I've taken over the past several years that never show up.  I know why this is but never thought about it long enough to solve.  The pictures that I'm not seeing are those I started taking when I switched to shooting RAW instead of JPG.  I'm am forever glad I made that choice by the way, but there was this minor downside that I was willing to live with until I figured out a simple solution.  And the key to that solution was Adobe's Lightroom--arguably the best base software for serious photographers (used in concert with other software packages).  You see, the screensaver will only display JPGs and so what I needed to do was convert the RAW images I wanted to see in my screensaver to JPG.  But I didn't need full quality images and didn't want to have a bunch of big files and duplicate images on my computer.

Lightroom has the capability to publish images to external sources.  Most people use this capability to publish to Flickr or Smugmug (I do both).  But the beauty is that you can also publish locally to your own hard drive.  You might wonder why you'd want to do that?  There are several great uses, but I'll give you the one reason that's relevant here--it's so you can have a folder of small JPG images that the screensaver will be able to use along with the other JPG images you might have in your My Pictures directory. 

So, I created such a folder, and then selected the RAW images that I've got published on my website gallery (www.CostaMesaPhotography.com) and created a collection that I can publish any time I add new images to it--super easy, super simple.  Now my computer's screensaver is flashing ALL my great images when it kicks in, and bring back lots of great memories!!