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Google brings its gorgeous Featured Photos screensaver to Mac, and it’s glorious

Published Nov 29th, 2016 3:22PM EST
screensavers for mac
Image: Google+

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If you’re a Chromecast owner, you know that letting the device site idle can be entertaining all on its own. That’s because Google’s fantastic photo stream screensaver pulls a seemingly endless collection of breathtaking shots from the web and displays them in high-resolution glory. Now, Google is treating Mac users to the very same eye candy.

The screensaver — which is officially called “Google+ Featured Photos Screensaver” because they couldn’t think of a catchy name, apparently — pulls snapshots from the massive collection of user-uploaded media on Google+. 

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Each photo is presented in fullscreen, and they’re all scaled perfectly to fit whatever display you happen to be using on your Mac. If you’re using two or more displays, a different photo stream will be shown on each, so there’s no double-vision effect with cloned photos on side-by-side monitors.

The download is a .saver file, so it’s a quick install for either a single user or multiple different user profiles. You’ll also get a prompt to allow the app to update automatically, which makes sense considering the screensaver is constantly pulling new content from Google+ in order to keep things nice and fresh.

With modern day computer display technology, screensavers are a bit of anomaly. We’re not longer at a huge risk of screen burn-in with most computer monitors, and the default settings on Mac OS typically put your monitor to sleep before a screensaver would kick in anyway, but if you’re the kind of person that likes to keep your monitor alive even when you’re using it, you’ll be hard pressed to find a screensaver with more personality than Google’s Featured Photos.