Google Photos Screensaver

The Google Photos Screensaver is part of the Google Pack which also includes Picasa.

As the name suggests, its a screensaver for showing photos - where those photos can come from

• directories on your disk
• images managed in Picasa
• your Picasa Web Albums
• general photo RSS feeds.

To retrieve photos from Picasa Web Albums you have to provide it with your login details, and it can then either get photos from your own albums, or from recent updates to the albums of people you have selected as favorites.  This uses the Picasa Web Albums API, including the currently  undocumented API call that retrieves the recent changes of favorites.

Unfortunately Picasa Web Albums do not offer a way to get to photos from across the community search, so you can't set that as your screensaver source - though you can use specific albums from other people using the standard RSS feed mechanism.

RSS feeds display a caption with the images - unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to disable this - which is a shame since it can detract from the impact of the images.

The screensaver also installs a Firefox extension that allows you to click on feed links and add them to the screensaver.

A few notes of interest from the executable

• The executable name is GPhotos.scr - it does look as if Google may be positioning GPhotos as a replacement or at least an addition to the Picasa branding
• There's a reference in the file to C:\dimich-picasa-dx\googleclient\picasa3\dazzle\CBurnInUI.cpp - not sure what to deduce from that - I suspect that dazzle is the codename of the picasa3 screensaver - now released on it's own as this Google Photos Screensaver