Apple's Upcoming App for Photos
Jim Hamm says, "If you use Apple's iPhoto or Aperture, you're probably aware that Apple is replacing those soon with a new app: Photos for OS X. In the following article, Jason Snell, former editor of MacWorld, gives his impressions of the new app." Take a look here: tidbits.com/e/15403
Changes Coming for iPhoto
"It looks like Photos for OS X will replace iPhoto later this spring. Here is an article with further info and impressions of Apple's new photo program," writes Jim Hamm.
Solving iPhoto Problems
If you were at Saturday's PMUG meeting you heard John Carter answer various concerns of those in the audience. Now, John has more to share! What follows should all be enclosed with quotation marks: it's all quoting him!
There may be times when you open iPhoto and you are presented with a cryptic error message that the iPhoto library is locked.
That indicates that the library was open at a time when the computer was improperly shut down and iPhoto did not have a chance to unlock the library. Or it could be that you are using two different computers or two different logins using the same library, and that the other computer or user left the library in a locked state or one or the other is still using it.
You can unlock any file/folder/library using the following procedure:
- Open Finder and navigate to the Pictures folder.
- Look carefully in the lower left corner of the icon for the iPhoto Library. If it has a tiny lock pictured there, go to the next step. Otherwise, jump over steps 3 and 4.
- Select the iPhoto Library folder (left-click once), and then hold down the Command key and press the ‘i’ key momentarily. This will bring up a new window.
- In the new window, look for the box in the General section that says “Locked.” Uncheck the box and close the window. You should now be able to open the iPhoto Library.
If the iPhoto Library is not locked, there may be an item inside that folder that is locked. Of course, the only way to see the contents of that folder is by the following:
- Right-click on the iPhoto Library folder and select “Show package contents.”
- In the content, look for a tiny lock icon on any item, and if found, unlock it as in step 4 above.
If none of the above helps, restart the computer.
If that doesn’t help, restart the computer and do a PRAM reset. This is done by holding down the Command, Option, P, and R keys all at the same time when you start the computer - and keep holding the keys down until you hear the second “gong” (the startup sound).
If that doesn’t help, open Disk Utility and run Verify Disk Permissions and Verify Disk. If you get an error on Verify Disk, you then need to restart your computer in Recovery Mode and run Disk Utility to perform Repair Disk. To start up in Recovery Mode, hold down the Command and R keys together until you see the Apple logo appear. After selecting English for language, you will be presented with a menu. In the menu is Disk Utilities, and it works just like it does when running in user mode. After running Repair Disk, click on the Apple logo in the menu bar and restart the computer.
If that doesn’t help, call Apple Support. If you are out of warranty, the call will be just $19.99, and it’s good for up to 60 days on the same issue - no matter how long you are on the phone with them or how many calls you have to make to clear up the problem.
There may be times when you get the message about a locked file when opening a document or the iTunes library. The same steps apply as above.
(Thanks to John for this step-by-step solution.)
Apple Stops Development of Aperture, Dropping iPhoto
"Apple introduced a new Photos app during its Worldwide Developer Conference . . . " is how the article dated 6-27-14 from the Loop begins. Ward Stanke sends this article that goes on with some details mentioning iPhoto, and is followed with 256 posted comments. Take a look.
Here John Carter jumps in with his observations. "I am very happy to see this coming. The iPhoto app has not been as powerful as I would like it to be. Aperture also misses the mark. I fully expect that the new Photos app will be at least as good as Elements (layers, etc). A much better search feature also has to be included for iOS. Slideshow need to be available across all devices with a view only capability for sharing. Same for photo Books. We shall see."
iPhoto Library Manager
John Carter is at it again with an update for one of his favorite apps, iPhoto Library Manager from FatCatSoftware.com. When iPhoto was updated to version 9 (now at 9.1.5, and is better known as iPhoto ’11), version 3 of iPhoto Library Manager didn’t do some of the things John wanted it to do, specifically merge iPhoto libraries. So it was necessary to update to iPhoto Library Manager version 4.
John is very impressed with the changes and wrote a review of the software which you can find in the PMUG website here.
Smart Photo Download Tip
"Did you find a photo on the Internet or in your email that you want to save?" asks John Carter. He's going to tell us what to do. "The best place for that photo is not on your computer in some picture folder, but in iPhoto (or even Aperture). Here's how.
"If the photo shows up in your Facebook account (from a friend or family), or it's just sitting in some website that you came upon (like that fantastic image of Comet ISON in Astronomy.com), first, right click on the image. In the menu that pops up, select "Add Image to iPhoto Library":
(Remember you can click on this screen shot to enlarge, then do Esc to come back to this page.)
John continues, "If the image is in an email message, click and drag it into the iPhoto icon in the Dock.
John continues, "If the image is in an email message, click and drag it into the iPhoto icon in the Dock.
"And don't forget to rename the image, add a description, and give it some keywords to help you find it in the future.
"More on this in November's General Meeting when I go into detail about how to manage and organize your iPhoto library."
"More on this in November's General Meeting when I go into detail about how to manage and organize your iPhoto library."
So be sure to mark your calendar or check your Calendar on the Dock for the November 16 meeting at 10 a.m. at the Prescott Public Library. John will give us more help with photos.
Here's the Help You Need
John Carter is a busy guy. You've heard his PMUG presentations, maybe his SIG ones, too. But John can give you personal help for those pesky problems that are slowing you down. At Saturday's PMUG meeting former Prez Howard LaPittus was bragging on John's helpfulness. Email John here. And he passes along the following info, too. Zenda Sergo is another local resource for anyone looking to take a formal class on how to use their Apple device or to learn a particular app like iPhoto or Pages. Zenda has a website that shows what classes she is offering. All classes are 2 hours in length, and she provides handouts ("Unlike me," comments John. "but then I don't have a formal class schedule to work from."). Click here for her website.
Tagging Photos and Files
Prez Art Gorski read what John said about tagging photos and files in his email just now. Here's Art's comment, "This reminded me of Gmail, where, unlike normal IMAP email, you use tags instead of folders. Methinks this, like documents in iCloud, is another nail in the coffin of a file system with folders. Apple has apparently decided that most folks can't deal with a directory structure. Want more proof? Spotlight searching for documents and All My Files in the Finder."
Changes Coming in Mavericks
Starting with a short note about the coming Mavericks John Carter simply pointed out, "Not an overhaul, says one reviewer, but just a tune-up. Read the full article here."
Then John emailed again and added more, "My comments below are not as a result of my being able to play with OS X Mavericks. I'm paraphrasing what other reviewers are saying.
"Probably the most significant change in OS X Mavericks, in my opinion, is what they've done with Finder. They added tabs and tags. These will be the greatest tools that any user could use. Tagging files like you do with photos in iPhoto will be a boon in finding a needle in a haystack. But then, you first have to go through all your files and tag them - just like with iPhoto.
"The second most important feature to me is iCloud Keychain. Storing all your login and private information in one place that can be instantly available on all Apple devices is like having 1Password, but without all the fancy features. However, this will mean that you should assign a separate Keychain master password, and it also means that you can have no login password on your desktop computer, a strong login password on your laptop and other mobile device, and still have all your password info secure behind a separate, strong password.
"What I'm waiting to hear about are the changes to iTunes and iPhoto. Some of the changes that went into iTunes 10 made a few people really mad - because one very useful feature was removed (to be able to create a mix on the fly without having to create a new playlist). I like the new iPhoto, but the features in Aperture are so compelling that I hardly ever use iPhoto anymore. What iPhoto needs is a built-in library manager like what is available in Aperture."
John has more to say! "I'm hoping they don't mess around with Pages and Keynote much (the way Windows did with Word and PowerPoint by restructuring the toolbar), but it would be nice if Apple offers a much larger selection of templates - for free.
"The new Maps isn't terrific, and its location sensing is not as accurate as Maps in iOS (which would be useful for a laptop, but not necessarily so for a desktop), but it does have some new feature that makes it fun to play with - still not as much fun as using Google Earth.
"There's a lot of noise by uninformed people about why Apple derailed the cat names for OS X versions when they adopted Mavericks." John concludes his email with a picture of a Saber Tooth Tiger and the final touch of humor, "All I can think of for a title is 'Windows, you're my next lunch!'"
Where Was this Photo Taken?
Here's some iPhoto info from Prez Art Gorski, "If you like using the Places feature in iPhoto to find photos by where they were taken, but your camera doesn't automatically put the geocoordinates on photos, what do you do? Well, you can use iPhoto itself to do this, but it's a little fiddly. If you import your camera pictures to your hard drive before you import them to iPhoto, here's a nifty free app that makes it much easier to do this task. http://www.theoneandonlysepp.com/gnt/
This site tells about a "Mac OS X docket to update metadata with location information."
Learning More About Photography
Interested in photography? John Carter to the rescue. He's now posted to the PMUG website this informative and illustrated report, "iPhoto for iPad vs. PhotoForge2." Go to http://www.pmug.us/reviews/ and benefit from his research.
Note: John Carter will be at the PMUG Genius Bar on November 17, when Art Gorski and Bobbie Pastor will be our other "experts" for this meeting.
Show Your Photography
Many of our PMUG friends are talented with their cameras. Have you made a photo into a picture postcard?
Carlene Hardt took these photos and Peter tells us, "Small batches we print at Costco as 4x6 photos and then Carlene attaches a self-adhesive back to make it a postcard. The backings come from Photographer's Edge. They have a WIDE variety of products: http://www.photographersedge.com/Postcards-4-x-6-pkg-of-25/productinfo/A298PC/
"They also have dozens and dozens of card frames you can put the photo in to make photocards: http://www.photographersedge.com/Blue-Mist-with-Raven-Black-Accent-Ink/products/103/
"Larger batches we have commercially printed as postcards, with custom information on the back side. We use Prints Made Easy who do a great job, http://www.printsmadeeasy.com , but we do occasionally have issues with getting certain colors right."
With a jpg of the postcard you can drag it to iPhoto and highlight it when it comes up on the album page. Up comes a little arrow at the bottom right side, giving you several choices. You can also click Create at the bottom right side of the iPhoto page, and find out how to order cards, albums, books, and calendars. Under Share you can order prints, from 4"x6" up to 20"x30". (Plan ahead for those creative Christmas gifts!)
Mountain Lion Installation: Read About It
John Carter jumps right in with Mountain Lion. He tells us, "Like Jim Hamm before me, I dove right in and updated my iMac to 10.8 today.
"The installation was painless. I started it and walked away for the rest of the day.
When I came back, several applications needed attention – mostly updates.
"The first surprise was a new application: Messages. This popped up in the middle of the screen all on its own. Apple's way of telling me it's there. Messages allows me to text anyone with an Apple device or PC with 10.8 for free. Messages is already available on iOS 5.1. So this is just another step toward making all Apple products look and feel the same. I doubt I will ever use Messages – unless there is someone out there who doesn't want to use Mail. Mostly, Messages is for iOS devices to avoid phone charges for text messaging.
"The next surprise was a string of short notices down the right side of the display. These were recent updates to Calendar. And each time Jackie added a new item to the Calendar on her MacBook Air, another notice popped up on my iMac. That's because she is sharing her Calendar with me to make sure I know what she's up to. And I have done the same for her.
"Another that surprised me was that Total Finder – an add-on to Finder – said that it was not tested on 10.8. It worked anyway.
"After performing just a few application updates – one was NeoOffice (3.3 Beta is out, available only to those who donated within the past year), I then discovered that the App Store had a few more updates waiting for me. These were iWork, iPhoto, iMovie, and Xcode.
"The update for iPhoto required a database update, and I haven't seen any obvious changes.
"iMovie thumbnails needed to be created for the project I was currently working on – that took quite a while. And oh, by the way - iMove is LOTS faster.
"When I opened Mail, the database had to be converted for the new 10.8. No problem. Can't see anything new so far.
"I expected some change in Preview. When I opened it, I saw a new window. It was telling me that I could now move my existing documents to iCloud by dragging them to that window from the Finder or other app. Before, what I would see was just a Finder window. Now, in the upper left corner of the Preview window are two new buttons: iCloud and On My Mac. Aside for a complete makeover in the Preview Menu, there is now a brand new Editor toolbar with an enhanced Adjust Color pane and a Smart Lasso.
"Move over, iPhoto! You may never use iPhoto again to make basic changes to a photo – unless, of course, the only way to access the photo is through iPhoto. The bad part of this is, now you have something else to spend time on. As with Lion, any change you make to a photo with Preview creates a version of the file – so you can always retrieve the original. And when you click on the filename, the menu now shows an option to move the image to iCloud. Clicking on Browse all Versions shows them in the same way that Time Machine shows your backups. Wow! I like the changes I just made to that photo.
"Remember what I said about the new buttons in the upper left of the Finder window when I opened Preview? You get the same two buttons (iCloud and On My Mac) with Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.
"I have no idea what's new in Xcode, and even if I did, I'm sure you wouldn't be interested.
And here John winds up his report with this, "All in all, it has been a good thing. Nothing really new to learn – except Messages. But then, I haven't read about all the new features in 10.8. I give this 10.8 upgrade a 10. Upgrading from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion may be like trading Windows for a Mac, but going from Lion to Mountain Lion will be like adding more icing to the cake.
"Where's my MacBook Pro? That's next!" OK, John, keep us posted.
iPhoto '11: Glitch or Not?
"I read somewhere a few months back that a feature that was available in iPhoto ’09 had been removed in iPhoto ’11 — and I believed it without doing some testing on my own." John Carter goes on to explain, "The story was that in iPhoto ’09 you could arbitrarily drop a pin in a map at a precise location where a photo was taken, and that in iPhoto ’11 the best you could do was specify the nearest city that was on the map. Not true. iPhoto ’11 allows you to first specify the nearest city and then move the pin to the precise nearby location.
In the image here, a photo was taken (using a camera that didn’t have GPS) in Jerome in the same building as the Post Office. When I tried to assign a place to the photo, the best I could do was enter Jerome, AZ. For some reason, I decided to just move the pin (click and hold on the red ball and drag it around) - and it stuck where I moved it! There you go! Precise positioning of the pin where the photo was taken."
iPhoto Report
David Passell reports: I recently installed iPhoto 11 (version 9.2.1). Compared to the 7.5.1 I was using it is a monster app. 1.2GB vs 189 mb. CAUTION: When opening, it UPDATES your iPhoto library so you can't go back. Before running it, I saved the older library to an external drive (89 GB 6 hours) just in case.
Now, replying to my question David explains, "I backed the old file (iPhoto library) onto a My Passport 500GB drive that I use on the Dell PC. Actually I can view some (but not all) of the pictures in the library on that Windows machine.
"I kept the old iPhoto 7.5.1. I had to use Time Machine to retrieve it. One annoying thing: When I purchased/downloaded the new iPhoto it updated iPhoto 7.5.1 to the new version, but kept the old name I had given it. I can't change the name; so even though it appears as 7.5.1 in the Applications folder and on the dock, it is the latest. If you want to keep your old version of iPhoto be sure to 'save' it in the Trash or compress it before you update."
A Simple Technique in iPhoto
He starts out, "Have you ever taken a photo that turned out to be, well, pretty drab?" Well, it's John Carter to the rescue. He goes on to say, "There is a simple technique you can use in iPhoto for enhancing the color of a photo (Edit -> Adjust, increase Definition), but sometimes it just isn’t enough or give you the result you were hoping for. You can vastly improve the color of any photo using layers in either Photoshop or GIMP. One contributor to Digital Photograpy School has provided detailed steps in two different posts, one for Photoshop and one for GIMP. Give it a try on one of your photos."
Managing Multiple iPhoto Libraries
"Here’s a dream come true for some people who have probably thousands of photos they want to keep in iPhoto!" exclaims John Carter. (You can download a FREE trial; that got your attention?)
"The problem with having a lot of photos in one iPhoto library is two-fold. One, it takes a long time to save it to a backup drive (like Time Machine), and two, it is much slower to access.
"If you can break up your photos into smaller chunks and still keep them all under the management of iPhoto, that would be a plus.
"There is a way. It’s called iPhoto Library Manager. There are way too many features of that application to explain here, but I’ll list them by name:
1. Multiple libraries
2. Info at a glance
3. Share and share alike
4. In sync
5. Automate it
6. Quick switch
7. Making copies
8. Doing the splits
9. Photo first aid
John concludes with this, "There's one version, 3.6.8, and it works for all versions of OS X from 10.4 and up and all versions of iPhoto from 4.0.3 and up. The price is $19.95."
iPhoto Help is Here
John Carter to the rescue! After an emailed question about cropping pictures in iPhoto John gives us the step-by-step info we need. The following is straight from him to us.
To crop a picture in iPhoto to send to a print service:
1. In iPhoto, right-click on the photo in the Photos, Event, or Album.
2. Select Edit in iPhoto.
3. Click on the crop tool.
4. Click on Constrain.
5. From the pull-down list of numbers, choose the size of the print you will be ordering. A rectangular box will appear on the photo.
6. Drag the corners or any side to resize the rectangle to include what you want in the photo. Notice that if you attempt to make the box very narrow that it will eventually switch from landscape mode to portrait mode.
7. You can reposition the rectangle by dragging from the inside of the crop box.
8. A Rule Of Thirds grid appears only while you are adjusting the size of the crop box.
9. When you have the desired area selected, click Done.
10. Select File > Export to save the file to a flash drive or thumb drive or on the internal hard drive. Be sure to select Current in the Kind option as this will ensure that you are exporting the edited image.
Now that you have the proper aspect ratio of the photo and supposedly of the desired size, you should also make sure that the dots per inch is set to at least 240dpi. This is done with Preview.
1. Double click on the exported photo from iPhoto to open it in Preview.
2. Select Tools > Adjust Size from the menu.
3. Deselect Resample image (see below). You must do this to before changing the Resolution.
4.
5. Notice that the ratio of width to height is not exactly 6:4, or 0.6667, but it’s close enough (0.6664) - we hope. Change the Resolution to 240 or 300 and select OK to save this setting. This is important! Do not skip this step!
6.
7. Select Tools > Adjust Size from the menu again.
8. Leave Resample image set and change the width or height to the desired final print size.
9. You now have a photo you can send to the printer and get back something to feel good about.
This is rather complex. Is there an application that will give the right aspect ratio, size, and resolution that isn’t so complicated? Yes. Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS can crop and resize the photo to be exactly the right size, aspect ratio, and desired resolution.
To crop a picture in Photoshop to send to a print service:
1. Open the file with Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS.
2. Select the Crop tool.
3. In the menu bar, set the aspect ratio, width, height, and resolution.
4. click to enlarge:
5. Crop the image.
6. Save the image.
Make Your Own Comic Strip
Turn on that creativity! Allen Laudenslager suggests you try this Make Your Own Comics program from Mac360. He describes the process, "You start by picking a template and inserting photos from your Mac iPhoto gallery. Of course the hard part is picking which photos and then creating the dialog to go with them. If you've always wanted to come up with your own comic strip, here's your chance!"