Use the iTunes Artwork Screen Saver to Cover Your Screen with Album Art

If you use a screen saver on your Mac, you may have chosen to have some photos display, in one of the many options available from OS X’s Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane. This can be very nice, but if you have a big music collection, you can also use the iTunes Artwork screen saver. This displays your album artwork at random. To use this, select it in the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane.

Screen saver prefs

If you click Screen Saver Options, you can choose how many rows display, and the delay before one of the graphics changes. For this screen saver isn’t static; the artwork changes, one at a time, every couple of seconds.

Here’s how it looks when in action:

Itunes artwork screen saver

Note that I’ve placed my cursor over an album near the center of the image; there’s a play button, and if you click this, you can start playing that album. This screen saver is a good way to view a random selection of your albums and choose one to play.

To exit the screen saver, just press the Escape key, or click the small Exit button at the bottom right of the screen.

11 thoughts on “Use the iTunes Artwork Screen Saver to Cover Your Screen with Album Art

  1. Good reminder on a great screensaver. Just be careful if you have small children in the house. Some album covers might prompt your daughter / son to ask “daddy, what’s that?”

  2. Good reminder on a great screensaver. Just be careful if you have small children in the house. Some album covers might prompt your daughter / son to ask “daddy, what’s that?”

  3. Visually this is one of my favourite screen savers. Functionally I hate that it requires a different method to “escape”. I can’t just move my mouse to dismiss it. So I don’t use it as often as I would like to.

    Joe

    • Yes, that’s because you can click to play an album. If any movement dismissed it, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

  4. Visually this is one of my favourite screen savers. Functionally I hate that it requires a different method to “escape”. I can’t just move my mouse to dismiss it. So I don’t use it as often as I would like to.

    Joe

    • Yes, that’s because you can click to play an album. If any movement dismissed it, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

  5. Kirk my iTunes on my macbook is all from the cloud. I have iTunes match as well as Apple Music. The main library is on my iMac. I just now put a new SSD on the macbook. All the songs are there as well as the album art. (Mostly) But when i try to select iTunes Artwork from my screen saver a black screen appears and says “Your iTunes library contains no songs with artwork” Clearly it does as the artwork appears in iTunes on my macbook. Can you help me?

  6. Kirk my iTunes on my macbook is all from the cloud. I have iTunes match as well as Apple Music. The main library is on my iMac. I just now put a new SSD on the macbook. All the songs are there as well as the album art. (Mostly) But when i try to select iTunes Artwork from my screen saver a black screen appears and says “Your iTunes library contains no songs with artwork” Clearly it does as the artwork appears in iTunes on my macbook. Can you help me?

What do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.