Pixelated images in RSS screensaver

Question

I added two RSS photo feeds to my RSS screensaver, one from flickr, one from Picasa online. The photos on both those sites are large, high-resolution photos. Yet 9 in 10 of those photos that cycle through the screensaver have incredibly poor image quality. They're extremely pixelated, making them look like I tried to make stretch a 1x1-inch thumbnail onto the whole 20-inch screen.
When I take one of those photos directly from the web page to make it my desktop background, it displays fine, no pixelation, so I know it's possible to display them good on a big 20" monitor!

Answer 1

If the image already has a custom thumbnail, that is what CoverFlow will display. If it doesn't, then CoverFlow will draw a thumb from the image content, and it will draw thumbs up to about 500 pixels in size. By resaving the photos with Photoshop, you undoubtedly got Photoshop's custom thumbnails clapped onto the image, and those thumbs are only 128 pixels. You have a choice: if you want to see custom thumbs, because they will display faster in Finder, then you will see those in CoverFlow and the quality will be poor at larger sizes; or you can forgo having custom thumbs and allow CoverFlow to draw the larger size thumbnails it is capable of showing. Finder will also draw thumbs for other views for files that have no thumbnails, it will do this on the fly, and will display them just fine, just noticeably slower. You tell it to do so using View->Show view options and check the box to "Show icon preview"--you need to do this for each sort of view (and the wording for showing an icon varie slightly with each sort of view). You can then click the "Use as Defaults" button at the bottom for Icon and List view. Individual folders that have their own settings (they have the "Always Open in" option checked at the top of the View Options pane) won't be affected, if you want them to you'll have to change things for those specific folders in the options pane.
Also, if you opt to not have custom thumbnails, you will need to tell Photoshop to stop putting them on the images. You do this in Photoshop's preferences. There's one "gotcha" doing this though: if the image has an alpha channel Finder will display the file as if the alpha channel were turned on as a mask. The only way to actually see the complete thumbnail for the image is with Photoshop's custom thumb, which will be 128 pixels max size.
Francine
Francine
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