Automatically Stream Photos from iPhone to a Mac Screen Saver with Photo Stream

The latest versions of iPhoto (11+) and OS X (Mountain Lion+) support Photo Stream screen savers, this means you can have your Mac display a screen saver show that automatically updates the stream of photos based on pictures that are taken on the go with an iPhone, without ever having to manually copy pictures over to the computer or set them into folders like the old fashioned way..

You probably already guessed as much, but OS X Photo Stream screen savers rely on iCloud. If you somehow have gotten this far in iOS and Mac ownership without a free iCloud account,

Step 1: Enable Photo Stream in iOS

To use the auto-updating Photo Stream screen savers in Mac OS X, you?ll first need to enable Photo Stream in iOS.

       Go to Settings, then ?iCloud? and scroll down to ?Photo Stream?

        Flip ?My Photo Stream? to ON

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You can also use individual shared streams if they have been shared and gathered by iPhoto.

Step 2: Enable Photo Stream in iPhoto for OS X

Speaking of iPhoto, that?s the next place you?ll want to look, because you need to enable Photo Stream in iPhoto as well. This allows the iOS device (iPhone in this example) to stream it?s images automatically to the Mac, with iPhoto being the receiver. From the Mac:

     Launch iPhoto and click ?Photo Stream? from the left menu 

     Click the big blue ?Turn on Photo Stream? button to let iPhoto start importing the pictures from your iOS device to the Mac via iCloud

Remember you will need iPhoto 11 or later to have this feature at all, and iCloud set up must be for the same account as the iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch).

Step 3: Choose the Photo Stream to Use as the Screen Saver in OS X

Now that iPhoto is going to automatically accept your photo streams from the iOS device, you can choose the individual photo streams as an option in the Screen Saver control panel:

       Open System Preferences from the Apple menu

       Choose ?Desktop & Screen Saver? and click the Screen Saver tab

       Select any slideshow style (Ken Burns is great) from the screen saver type, then click the ?Source? button

       Under ?Recent iPhoto Events? choose the photo stream you want to use as the screen saver

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