Kindle Tips

I’m answering more questions from our fabulous readers today!

I’ve now had my Kindle long enough to wish that I could put my own images onto the page that is displayed when the machine goes to sleep.  As much as I admire Virginia Woolf and John Steinbeck, it would be nice to be able to put different pictures in their place.  Is there any chance for this to happen at some point?

Absolutely!    I’ve found these instructions from MobileRead’s Kindle forum;  I’ve tested them myself, and they seem to be working just fine.

First:

The maximum size for bookplate screensavers for the Kindle can be 800 pixels high by 600 pixels wide. The maximum size for Kindle images INSIDE books is 550 pixels high by 450 pixels wide.   The image files can’t be larger than 64kb, so aim for below 60kb.

Make the images greyscale and save them as GIF/JPG files (though I’m told .png works too.) color images don’t look so well, again due to low contrast.

High-contrast images look best, due to the Kindle display’s limited dynamic range. Boost the contrast on your images.

Resize, crop, and convert your image to black-and-white on your computer.

Now that you’ve got your files, you have to put them onto the Kindle using your USB cable.

I’ve grabbed these specific instructions from phuocle’s post on the MobileRead’s Kindle forum;:

1. Attach the Kindle to a computer using the USB cord.

2. Using Windows Explorer (or whatever you use to see individual files/folders) , you should see a new drive called Kindle under My Computer. Go to that drive. (Or if you have an SD card in your Kindle, you can go to the SD drive.)

3. Create a new folder called “pictures” and a subfolder called “screensavers” under it. Make sure both folder names are all lowercase.

4. Copy your image files into the screensavers folder. Your pictures should be 600×800 pixels and black & white. I’ve only used .jpg files. [[I've read that .gif and .png files work as well]]

5. After copying is complete & it is safe, eject the Kindle and remove the Kindle from the USB connection.

6. Go to your Home menu and press alt-z. This will create a new book called “screensavers”. Open it. You’ll see each of your pictures. You can advance through them with the prev. page and next page buttons. [[Note: The new book will appear at the END of your book list]]

7. While viewing your pictures, look at the bottom of the Kindle screen. If you see your battery indicator & Menu prompt, press alt-F to go into Full Screen mode.

8. On each photo, press alt-shift-0 (i.e., alt-shift-zero) . After a brief delay, you’ll get a message that your picture has been exported as screensaver. Click Close on the message.

9. Navigate to each of the pictures you want to use and repeat the above step.

10. When you’ve got all your pictures loaded, test them by going into & out of sleep mode. Alt-aA (i.e., alt-font size button) puts it to sleep & wakes it up again. Each time it sleeps, it should use a different image. If you see the same image all the time, relook at Step 3.

If you want to get rid of your custom screen savers, follow these steps:

1. Attach the Kindle to a computer using the USB cord.
2. Using Windows Explorer (or whatever you use to see individual files/folders) , go to your Kindle drive under My Computer.
3. If you see a folder called system, skip this step. If you don’t see the system folder, click on the Tools menu & then Folder Options. Go to the View tab, and look at the Advanced Settings. Under Hidden Files and Folders, select Show Hidden Files and Folders. Click Apply, then OK. You should now see a system folder.
4. Under the system folder, you’ll see a screen_saver folder. Delete all the files that are in that folder.
5. After you disconnect from the USB, you may see your last custom screensaver one more time, but after that it will revert back to the pre-loaded Kindle screensaver images.

Let me know how it works!  I don’t have a ton of pictures to choose from here at my office, so some of my images looked better on my Kindle than others.   I’d love to hear from you – and always feel free to comment here or email us with any of your questions!