App: ArtSaverApp
Developer: Gabriel Zachmann
Genres: Entertainment, Photo & Video

ArtSaverApp is a slideshow / photo-frame app for large image collections you have stored in a folder (or several folders) on your disk.
It is mostly geared towards people who want to see their pictures as large as possible, with some information about each image currently being displayed, and with more controls and options.

With ArtSaverApp, you get more control than Apple's built-in screensaver: at runtime, you can, for instance, review previous images (using arrow keys); in the settings, you can control the image duration, image transition, filter out images, and more.
You can also download a companion (helper) app that allows you to turn ArtSaverApp into a surrogate screensaver (see the Manual or the web page).

There is also a companion screensaver that is one of the few slideshow screen savers that allows you to see a different sets of pictures on each monitor in a multi-monitor setup, and with the same set of options as ArtSaverApp. (More details on this in ArtSaverApp's manual, or on the app's web page.)

Note that, by design, ArtSaverApp does not sport fancy visual effects, such as picture postcard, mosaic, or the like! It only offers still images, zoom in/out, and pan & zoom (a.k.a. Ken Burns effect). The goal of ArtSaver is to present the pictures such that you can enjoy them in their full glory.
Note, also, that ArtSaverApp does *not* come with its own pictures; it assumes that you want to see *your* pictures.

Don't forget to go to ArtSaverApp's Settings when you run it for the first time.

Some of the app's features (same for the companion screensaver):
• Can display the file name/path, some embedded "EXIF" tags, and GPS location of the image currently being shown
• Keeps a persistent database of all the images found in the specified folder (including sub-folders). Thus, it can handle huge image databases (250k images are no problem), display images immediately when started, and, does not "exercise" the disk every time it gets invoked
• Handles large image files well (like 100+ MB per image on disk)
• Keyboard controls at runtime (app only): go back to previously shown images, pause the slide show, reveal the current image in Finder, and more
• Display images in random order, or sorted by file name, or sorted by date embedded in the image file. For more details, see the Manual, section "The Order in Which ArtSaverApp Shows Images"
• Many configuration options, such as duration of image, filtering out small images, font size for info, and many more
• Can follow aliases (and symbolic links) during image search

Please note that ArtSaverApp CANNOT access the photos you keep in the Photos app of your Mac.

You can find the complete manual on ArtSaverApp's web page (and in the app, of course).

On the web page, there are further hints and tips, for instance, work-arounds for some obstacles, or older macOS versions.

Release notes:
New feature:
- Support for sorting by embedded date, as an alternative to sorting by filename
  (EXIF tag DateTimeDigitized, a.k.a. CreateDate)
  (Caveat: in case of sorting by date, this takes much longer than sorting by filename)

Changes:
- Made the code more robust (hopefully) in the case where several monitors have the same name
- Improved the heuristics (hopefully) to decide when to shrink the size of the history,
  in order to ease the memory pressure on Mac's with a small RAM.
- Paths of image files are now truncated at the beginning so that only the part after the common
  base folder (which the user selected in ArtSaver's settings/options) is shown
- Auto Launcher (hopefully) respects a running instance of Microsoft Teams session better
- Info-level log message should now be persistent 
- Better logging (info log messages are now persistent, too; also in AutoLauncher)

Fixed:
- Potential bugs in case a file URL was no longer available, or
  mainDirectoryLocation was still nil (which could happen after a fresh install?)
- Memory leak in case the image list contained just 1 image
- Screen saver (surrogate) mode handles sleeping Mac better
- Auto Launcher: better handling of different sleep/standby modes (hopefully)
- Auto Launcher: "ArtSaverApp Settings" should now work, even if ArtSaverApp is already running

Known Bug:
- On a multiple display setup, the screensaver (in System Settings) sometimes runs only on one 
  monitor/display, even though macOS (legacyScreenSaver) launches one instance per display.
  This seems to be a bug in macOS 13.x . It affects only some users. Nothing I can do about it ..