Google ScreenSaver Loses Image Locations

Subscriber Gordon Clark wrote to ask me about a problem he was having with the Google Screensaver.

Hi Terry, I’m a new subscriber, I have a question about the Google Screensaver. I love it, it’s a great product.

However I recently updated it and now I can’t hover over the bottom of the screen to see the edit buttons – play, back, forward, time delay etc. More importantly I can’t hover at all to read the photo info for when I see something come up on the screensaver and go – Hey, I remember that, when was that taken?

Just in the last few weeks therefore, my screensaver has gone off as soon as I touch the mouse without waiting for an Escape. Can’t hover at all without the images going away.

I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling but I get two messages saying "can’t uninstall/reinstall over a nawer version". For now it’s running OK but I don’t have the fun of stopping it to check data.

Can you help? Regards, Gordon

I wrote back to Gordon to tell him that I use the Google Screensaver, too, but that I’m not having the same problems he is and I haven’t heard of them before.

My copy is working correctly with the edit buttons. But, I don’t recall ever being able to hover over something and read photo details — I do that in Windows Explorer, but I didn’t know that the Google Screensaver has done it in the past.

By the way, it’s not just Escape — any key will stop the screensaver.

I have a suspicion that you’re you’ve got a fancy multi-button mouse and are clicking a side mouse button when you reach for the mouse.

Gordon wrote back to say:

Hi Terry,

Thanks for getting back to me, I appreciate that.

Actually I’m using a laptop with a standard built-in thumb-pad-thingy mouse below my keyboard. Nothing fancy there. Give it a try on your screensaver, if you hover over whatever photo is showing you see the Play, Back, Forward etc buttons, right? Well, when I did that I also was able to see simple details – the photo number and which directory Google was reading it from. Not full MS photo info of course, but I happen to label my directories by month and year so that was useful to me.

The screensaver has stopped doing that at all – it doesn’t show me any info, it just quits. I’ve kept on trying to install & reinstall but so far no luck.

Regards,

Gordon

I sent Gordon another email to tell him that I thought he meant he had been seeing the metadata (date, ISO speed, F-stop, etc.) that was embedded into the photo .jpg file. I see the file path and file name and have ever since I started using Google Screensaver.

That hadn’t changed. Just to make sure, I tried to update Google Screensaver, but I already had the latest version according to Google Updater.

My message must have brought that idea to light because Gordon found the problem was apparently caused by a different Google program:

Hi Terry,

Just FYI, and in case any of your other readers encounter the same issue, I think I’ve solved the screensaver problem. It appears to be an issue with the Picasa 3 upgrade. I uninstalled both Picasa and the Google Screensaver then reinstalled from Google Pack, which gives you Picasa 2. The screensaver was working fine as it should. Then as soon as I downloaded the prompted Picasa 3 upgrade the screensaver lost that functionality I told you about. Picasa 3 is a nice upgrade but maybe they haven’t integrated it with the screensaver yet?

Cheers,

Gordon