First off, I'm brand new to Linux and programming in general. I caught the rona a few months ago and the quarantine time I had opened up the possibility of hobbying for literally the first time ever. I bought an arduino and a raspberry pi then was off to the races.

One of my first projects was a MagicMirror setup and I have been looking for a way to build a custom screensaver that is simply a slideshow of pictures from a specified folder. I have xscreensaver and have played around with some of the customizations on there but nothing allows me to achieve this without the photos having weird effects imposed on them like tiles or droplets but nothing for just plain photo slideshow.

I'm wanting to program my MM to wake on PIR and use the screensaver so that the smart mirror can double as a digital photo frame when not being used. Can anyone point me in the right direction for learning how to program your own screensaver or customize xscreensaver to be able to achieve this?

Xscreensaver's GSlideshow and Carousel will display photos without special effects, or at least with minimal ones.

After you select the screensaver, click the "Settings" button in the bottom right to manage any special effects, like zoom and percentage of the photo to display.

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Anyhting that can run (endlessly) in fullscreen can be used as a screensaver, at least in Xorg/X11.
Look for software called xss, xss-lock or xautolock. They all can launch a custom full-screen software.
Further ideas: https://notabug.org/ohnonot/termss

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I hope that Joe Shields is still around... and reads this thread.

I miss the Joe-Cartoon-Screensaver, full with (original) sound... and if it were that simple.

Just be sure to base your efforts on Xscreensaver:

• I told you so, 2021 edition
  
• Hold down RET for 70 seconds to get a root shell
• I told you so, again
• We live in a magical future where "strings" is exploitable
• The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was
• Has Gnome 3 decided that people shouldn't want screen savers?

Thanks for all the replies. I found them useful and was ultimately able to get the screensaver functionality I was looking for. Thank you all!