Once you start accruing a lot of photos in your iPhoto library or using it as a screensaver, you’ll probably notice that you start seeing photos you’d rather not see all the time. Maybe you have 20 shots of your cat that are very similar and don’t want your scrolling through iPhoto or screen saver to be inundated by cat photos (as difficult as that may be for my cat to believe!), or maybe you’ve got some photos you’d rather not show off to anyone who happens to walk by while your screen saver is running or you’re scrolling through your iPhoto library. Luckily, in iPhoto ‘08 there’s a quick way to fix this that doesn’t require deleting or moving any photos.
Entries Tagged 'Miscellaneous Monday' ↓
Hiding iPhotos
January 14th, 2008 — Miscellaneous Monday
Personalizing
January 8th, 2008 — Miscellaneous Monday
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great <insert holiday of choice> or at least a good few vacation days before barreling headlong into the new year. At the end of the year, I always find that I wind up left with tons of photos that I love seeing but seldom take the time to page through my iPhoto library or other photo archives to relive all of the special moments.
A couple great ways to catch a bit of nostalgia in your everyday life are buried in the OS X Desktops and Screen Savers. By opening the System Preferences panel and clicking “Desktop and Screen Saver” you can choose from many built-in or customizable options.
The Desktop tab will allow you to choose from many Apple-selected desktop images, or even choose photos from your Pictures Folder or iPhoto albums! (If you are using iPhoto ‘08, and have Events set up, you can also select a particular Event)
If you can’t decide which image is your favorite, you can choose a folder or album and use the controls at the bottom of the panel to have the photos cycle through on a schedule you set. This way you can see a new Desktop image every 30 minutes, every time you reboot, etc.
Another fun place to view your photos (or personalize your computer another way) is on the screen saver. In this System Preferences tab, you can once again choose from a myriad of Apple-created screensavers from simple changing colors, to sunny beach scenes, to a news RSS feed and even your own photos.
As with the Desktop Image settings, you can choose your Pictures Folder or iPhoto albums and events. In this mode, you can even choose several different ways for your photos to be displayed (this will vary slightly between versions of OS X. Leopard has a slideshow, “falling prints” and a mosaic maker while Tiger had some different display options.
Free Web Chatting - Built Into Your Mac
December 10th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
iChat is an application that comes packaged with OSX, but unless you’re actively looking for a new chat application, it’s often undiscovered or overlooked. It’s a versatile program that allows you to chat with other people who use several different messaging services, many of them free, and even allows you to video chat if you happen to have an iSight.
Today I’ll just go over the basics of what you need to use iChat, and we’ll explore tips and tricks for web chatting in the future.
Managing Saved Passwords
December 3rd, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
Many places you need to enter a password give you the option of saving it “to your keychain,” freeing you from the need to remember or enter passwords over and over. What happens to your passwords, though? What if you need to remember one, or delete one? You can find all the answers in the Keychain Access application buried with the other Utilities.
Finding Photos Outside of iPhoto
November 26th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
Between Halloween, Thanksgiving, a plethora of December holidays and New Years, ’tis the season for photo management. But if you use iPhoto, can you use your photos outside of iPhoto? Before iPhoto ‘08 (version 7.0), you could easily navigate to your iPhoto Library in the finder or an Open File dialog, find the photo you want and open it, upload it to a website, or use it the same ways you did before iPhoto ‘08. Now, if you navigate to the iPhoto Library, instead of a directory full of photos organized by date, you’re confronted with a single icon.
Luckily, there are some simple strategies for getting to your photos if you want to get to them through the file system.
Address Book As Birthday Calendar
November 19th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
Address Book is great for keeping track of contact information, but it has several other helpful tricks up its sleeve. For example, with a few quick changes tweaks, you can use it to automatically create a calendar for keeping track of birthdays in iCal. Once this calendar has been created, anytime you add a contact’s birthday to your address book it will automatically show up in iCal on their birthday each year.
Special Characters
November 12th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
You can place many special characters in text documents by holding down the Option key and pressing various other keys, but this doesn’t help much if you don’t happen to recall that pressing Option-R will get you the ® symbol. There is actually a large array of characters that you can get by pressing different combinations of keystrokes, but Apple’s Character Palette is a much easier way to get to them.
Eeny, meeny, miny, iPod - Holiday Buyer’s Guide
November 5th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
November is here, and with it the holiday shopping season is upon us. Apple has a new line-up of iPods seemingly released exclusivels to be fodder for wish lists, but what are the real differences between the iPods? Which one would make the best gift for the special someone on your gift list? Continue reading →
Should you upgrade to Leopard?
October 29th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
If you’ve been within 100 yards of an Apple store or media source in the past few days, you’re probably aware that Apple released another Big Bad Operating System to the public. Leopard - OS X 10.5 - came out on Friday. Addicts flocked to stores, or had pre-ordered copies delivered directly to their doorsteps.
Many people have either installed it already, or are in the process of deciding whether to upgrade. If you already have a well-functioning copy of Tiger (10.4) running on your beloved Mac, do you need to upgrade? Today we’ll cover some of the reasons you might want to wait a bit before forking over that $129 for the new software as well as some reasons Leopard might be worth it to upgrade immediately.
Popping In and Out
October 22nd, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
If you’ve got more than one user who uses your computer, you may have run into the problem of several people wanting to use it at once. Sometimes one person will be using the computer, and another needs to check on something quickly - check his email, look up a contact’s phone number, grab a file off the hard drive. Or perhaps the first user is doing something with sensitive information that the second user shouldn’t be able to access, meaning that the first guy needs to stand and supervise the second as they do what’s needed in a new browser window or log out so that the sensitive information is protected.
This could all be a big ordeal if the original user has to quit everything, log out, wait for the next user to log in, find their information, log out, log the first user back in so she can pick up where she left off. Luckily, Apple’s given us a way to make this process quick and easy. For some reason, this is another great feature that was talked about a lot when it was first introduced, and then a lot of people forgot about it and newer users have never even heard of it. So, today, let’s look at Fast User Switching.