I found a solution by researching Mate screensaver. Mate already has an image viewer / image browser that functions, so I uninstalled Pornview etc. Thumbnails are not useful for a slideshow. They are trying to read all the images and store all the information and create thumbnails. Both of them have difficulty dealing with a directory with many files in it. I was never able to get Pornview or Imageoporama to make a slideshow either. Some of the packages that claim to have slideshow capability do not appear to have it, or at least the term "slideshow" is nowhere to be found in their front end. Every time you start it you will see something great, you will feel something strange, you will get a delight. Imageoporama wants to make a video out of images rather than a slideshow. 7art Liquid Mercury Stream ScreenSaver v.2.0 : Description: Its almost unbelievable to understand the semi-random behavior of the Liquid Mercury screensaver. A slideshow needs to have the ability to pick a random image. Pornview is the closest to what I want, but it crashed trying to cope with a large dir of image files, and also does not appear to have any randomization function or automatic slideshow capability. I evaluated Imageoporama, Pornview, and a couple of others and all of them seem to have something else in mind other than my purpose. This afternoon, I searched for a slideshow for Mate using PackageKit. I need to determine whether KDE's screensaver can be activated via shortcut. At the moment I am configuring Linux Mint 13 KDE on a test computer to see whether it can replace Linux Mint 13 Mate, because KDE has a screensaver that permits changes to the amount of time each image is displayed. I tried the edit to make xscreensaver load at boot, but it did not work on my install. I tried xscreensaver and Gnomescreensaver and I think one other, but they seemed to have problems. There is also a problem with the Mate screensaver turning on during video, but I was able to fix that problem with a clever hack that someone on the Linux Mint forum offered. I have not been able to make a working shortcut to activate the Mate screensaver. I also want to be able to activate the screensaver immediately via a shortcut icon. I like to display each image for about 60 seconds, because the images may be masterpieces. Mate has a screensaver that is similar to these specifications, but it is preset to display each image for 20 seconds, no more and no less.
I am not interested in any other types of screensavers and do not care about transitioning or special effects. I want a screensaver that displays a random local image file for a user-configured number of seconds without special effects, but with the possibility of displaying title, filename and other info.
It is superior to the Windows default screensaver. In Windows XP I purchased a third-party utility known as gPhotoshow for its additional features. I regard the screensaver as the most important component for the computer. The screensaver plays during parties while the computer is playing music and whenever the computer is idle for more than 5 minutes. I have a collection of fourteen thousand paintings, natural landscapes, sculptures and buildings in high-resolution that look fantastic on a plasma monitor, and so a screensaver is important to me.