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Linux Mint Pictures Screensaver

Tane Harre
Tane Harre Linux

This is something I picked up out of the Mint Forums under the title "screensaver using my folder of pictures? " and it allows you to have the pictures and photos from a directory of your choice as a screensaver on Linux Mint Cinnamon (5.8.4) in a random order.

There were two options given in the thread. The first was to use xscreensaver and then disable the Cinnamon screensaver from starting but I prefer to keep things intact as much as possible so while that might work, there is a second option where you can run a script.

The script is from a collection of scripts written by smurphos and hosted on github here.

Instructions from thread

Install git

apt install git

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/smurphos/nemo_actions_and_cinnamon_scripts.git

Make the directory for local scripts

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

Copy the the script to the new directory

cp -r ./nemo_actions_and_cinnamon_scripts/.local/bin/lock_screen_slideshow.sh ~/.local/bin

Copy the autostart entry to the right place

cp -r ./nemo_actions_and_cinnamon_scripts/.config/autostart/lock_screen_slideshow.desktop ~/.config/autostart

Final stage is to review the first part of the script to set your directory you want to source the images from - open the script in a text editor

xdg-open ~/.local/bin/lock_screen_slideshow.sh

Find this section and amend the variable SLIDESHOW_DIR to point to the directory of your choice and save the amended script

# Set SLIDESHOW_DIR to a directory of your choice
# This directory and it's sub-directorys will be searched for images
# for display in a random order in slideshow mode
SLIDESHOW_DIR="/usr/share/backgrounds"

Finally log off and log back in

It works and works well. I would note that there is also another variable that you can change in the script and that is,

# INTERVAL is the time time in seconds between background transitions in slideshow mode
INTERVAL=20

The default is actually set to 10 seconds which is a little to fast for me as I like to look at any good ones I see. The only other thing I have left to do is to figure out how to lower the opacity of the over-layed shadow as the pictures are a bit dark but that can be left for another time.

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