JPEG Saver 5.16
Published
There is not as much in version 5.16 of JPEG Saver as I had wanted to get done, but the next few items on the to-do list could take a while and there are a couple of important bug fixes to get out. It also includes a couple of other useful features, so I'm not too disappointed.
Span across displays
The most interesting new option in version 5.16 is in the multi-monitor dialog. In the drop-down list for the main display you will now find an option saying “Span across displays”. What this does is create a single window that covers the whole of your virtual desktop and treats it as one screen.
How well this works really depends on your graphics card being able to cope with it and your different screen positions not causing problems. If you have two identical monitors side-by-side it should work well; in my case the monitors are different sizes, shapes and resolutions so sometimes things are off the bottom edge of one screen. This is because JPEG Saver's display code can only handle rectangular screens and doesn't care that (0,1079) on the virtual screen is somewhere below the bezel on my physical monitor.
Plain text
This is actually a very simple update, but one that I thought might be useful. There is now a “Plain text” item available from the menu on the items tab that allows you to put your own text on the screen somewhere. You could always do this before by choosing one of the other text items and not using any of its tokens, but this way is more efficient.
Scanning disabled folders
This is a new option in the “More controls” dialog, which allows the desktop helper process to scan through disabled folders for files. Enabling this means the database can be kept up to date with changes from all the folders in the folder list, not just those that are active.
The disabled folders scan only happens from the desktop helper because it is a waste of time to scan them at screensaver start time when they are not going to be used.
Preview
The last of the non-bug updates is to how JPEG Saver does things when you press the “Preview” button at the bottom of the config dialog. Up until now pressing the button just ran the screensaver, but in version 5.16 it runs in a slightly different mode that tries to do things a bit quicker. Its temporary database is tuned to prefer speed over file integrity, the metadata scan and forced folder rescan are disabled, and the database is not rescanned if its last scan was less that twelve hours ago.
Finally, if a scan is still required then JPEG Saver will stop looking after finding a maximum of 1000 images. Unless you have some aggressive filters enabled that should be enough to provide a reasonable preview. The temporary preview database is deleted after the preview run completes, so none of this affects how the main screensaver runs.
I think there is more I can do to make this faster, but this should be a decent improvement already.
Fixes
The first one of these is the most important - adding new logo images was not working, and was actually crashing the config dialog. That could be very annoying. The second one is a bit more obscure: images used in “stretch” scaling mode that were already the right size were not showing up on the screen. That was a confusing one to find and fix thanks to all the different resizing options that there are now.
Downloads
JPEG Saver 5.16 is available from the downloads page.