# Screensaver Pics



## harpangel36 (Jul 25, 2010)

I am trying to convert my pics to screensaver images for my husband's new Kindle for his birthday tonight. I think Jason911 did mine for me before. I have followed the instructions here and converted, resized etc but the file sixe is still 1.2MB and the ones Jason did for me were only 128KB. Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong or who might be able to quickly convert some images for me? I have photoshop elements and iphoto. Guess I shouldn't have waited so long to get this done


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

What format are you saving the files in? JPG (JPEG) will give you the smallest file size, at the loss of some resolution. I find PNG to be a good compromise, with full resolution and a decent amount of file size compression. Also, before saving the image, change the image type to gray-scale (instead of RGB or other full-color type) to help save additional space).

Here is a tutorial I came up with for using "The GIMP" to make screen-savers, if that helps any: http://www.ebookworm.us/2010/08/28/creating-kindle-screen-saver-images-with-gimp/


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## srmalloy (Mar 3, 2009)

NogDog said:


> What format are you saving the files in? JPG (JPEG) will give you the smallest file size, at the loss of some resolution. I find PNG to be a good compromise, with full resolution and a decent amount of file size compression. Also, before saving the image, change the image type to gray-scale (instead of RGB or other full-color type) to help save additional space).


Just converting it to grayscale can cause problems with banding on the image, where the Kindle maps the gray level to the nearest of the 16 shades it will display; this can cause you to lose detail in your image, depending on what the shades in your image are like. To address this, what I did (using Paint Shop Pro) was to create a grayscale image that had sixteen shades of gray in it starting with white at index 0 and darkening in even steps to black at index 15 (RGB triplets of 255, 238, 221, 204, 207, 187, 170, 153, 136, 119, 102, 85, 68, 51, 34,17, 0 in order) with the rest of the palette black, then exported the image's palette as 'kindle.pal'. This gave me a palette of sixteen gray levels that I use with other pictures.

When I make an image to use as a screensaver image, I'll fiddle with image size and cropping to get a 600x800 image, then convert it to grayscale, then I look at it and decide if I need to tweak the balance -- I'll use the Histogram Adjustment function to expand midlevels to get better definition in the image if the straight grayscale comes up looking flat, for example -- then I load the Kindle palette into the image using error diffusion. This maps all the pixels in the image to one of the sixteen gray levels, but it keeps track of how much it had to shift each pixel and dithers the colors to spread the 'error' out; if you had an area that was a gray level between two of the Kindle's 16 levels, you'd wind up with a mixture of pixels that were mapped to the next lighter gray level and next darker gray level, so that viewed from more than a few inches away, the pixels blur into an intermediate gray. (I'd load an example, but I can't get to imageshack from where I am right now; I'll have to return when I get home and post a sample)


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## angelmum3 (Sep 12, 2010)

somone on the other forum (photography, share your photo on kindleboards)

http://www.knittersreview.com/article_yarn.asp?article=/review/profile/070412_a.asp

posted this page, I just click on choose file and then choose a picture from my laptop, then I hit get screen -saver image, and viola - easy peasy...


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

angelmum3 said:


> somone on the other forum (photography, share your photo on kindleboards)
> 
> http://www.knittersreview.com/article_yarn.asp?article=/review/profile/070412_a.asp
> 
> posted this page, I just click on choose file and then choose a picture from my laptop, then I hit get screen -saver image, and viola - easy peasy...


I don't think that was the link you intended to paste here? 

I'm guessing you may be talking about this little script I put together awhile ago? http://charles-reace.com/kindle_screensaver.php


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## kindelken (Feb 27, 2011)

Hi, all. Being a nooby (got my K3 last week) I won't get into using a hack (scares me) but as for viewing my own photos on my Kindle, I found that a lot easier than what I've seen in the forum. In my "Notes to self" I included the steps that worked for me under "Showing your pictures" at http://www.sticksite.com/kindle/


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