It’s not that we’re going to do anything difficult here. But we’re going to take a prebuilt Apple screen saver, throw our own images in there and then test it. First off, go to /System/Library/Screen Savers and let’s grab a copy of, let’s say Nature Patters.slideSaver. I’m going to call my new screen saver MJ.slideSaver and put it into the same directory (/System/Library/Screen Savers). Now let’s go into the new MJ.slideSaver and then into the Contents directory. From here, we’re going to give our new screen saver a new name by altering the Info.plist file. Find the CFBundleName key and change the string listed for it to the string you’d like (in my case it is MJ), save and then close the file.
Now let’s change the slides that appear in the screen saver. To do so we’re going to go into the Resources directory. Here there are 8 images called NaturePatterns01.jpg to NaturePatterns08.jpg. Let’s replace those with 8 new files with your images, of the same name. Now reboot and you should see your screen saver listed in System Preferences. Or, don’t reboot and use the recent article on setting a screen saver from the command line to immediately enable it.
You might be asking why not just use an iTunes folder. But if so you might be assuming that iTunes is actually installed…
