MacOS – Terminal output as a screensaver

I would verify that your iPhoto library is fully intact. To do this:

1. Open Finder and open the /Applications folder.
2. Scroll down to iPhoto.
3. Pressing Option and Command, double-click iPhoto.

You'll be presented with a Rebuild Photo Library window. I would check the following options:

• Repair the iPhoto Library Database
• Rebuild the photos' small database
• Examine and repair iPhoto Library file permissions

Click Rebuild and wait until the process is complete. Once it's all done, go back to System Preferences and check to see if you can select iPhoto and albums okay.

If the issue persists, I'd take a look at this article on Mac OS X Hints and follow the steps listed there.

Good Luck!

1. Quit System Preferences.

2. Locate the relevant plist in terminal by

   ls ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.*.plist
   

   You should see something like

   /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.0B39A0DE-D1EE-59FF-85C0-6EA16FCB015B.plist
   

   Note that hyphen-delimited alphanumeric string. It might be host dependent, judging from that ByHost directory name. (Or maybe it's not. At the moment I have only one Mac at my disposal so I can't tell.)

3. In terminal, run the following commands (with the hyphen-delimited alphanumeric string replaced by what you found in the last step):

   defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.0B39A0DE-D1EE-59FF-85C0-6EA16FCB015B.plist moduleDict -dict moduleName iLifeSlideshows path /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/iLifeSlideshows.saver type 0
   defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.0B39A0DE-D1EE-59FF-85C0-6EA16FCB015B.plist
   

That's it. There's one problem with this approach: it seems that multiple screensavers are registered with this iLifeSlideshows.saver (e.g. Classic), and I couldn't locate the plist controlling which one is shown. But according my testing, if you've chosen "Ken Burns" in System Preferences and later changed it to "Flurry", then when you run the above commands you will get "Ken Burns" back. Otherwise, no guarantee — for instance, you might get "Classic" if that's the last used one from iLifeSlideshows.saver.