Is Your Apple Watch Out to Lunch? Check These Settings

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Is your Apple Watch failing to turn on its screen when you raise it, display notifications from your iPhone, or even update the time zone? watchOS has four modes accessible from Control Center (swipe up from the bottom of the screen) that are useful but can cause confusion if you forget to turn them off:

  • Silent Mode: In Silent mode, your Apple Watch won’t make any sounds, but will provide haptic feedback you can feel on your wrist.
  • Theater Mode: When in Theater mode, your Apple Watch not only turns on Silent mode, it also keeps the screen dark unless you tap the screen or press a button.
  • Do Not Disturb: As with Theater mode, enabling Do Not Disturb turns on Silent mode and prevents notifications from lighting up the screen.
  • Airplane Mode: Invoking Airplane mode turns off the Apple Watch’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and the cellular radio if your watch supports that. Without Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the watch can’t communicate with your iPhone and will thus miss notifications and time zone changes.

Need to Merge Photos Libraries? Here Are Your Options

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Photos makes it easy to create and switch between libraries. That’s good when photos need to be kept completely separate. For instance, a real estate agent might want to keep personal photos separate from house photos taken for work. But too much separation is annoying—you have to keep switching between libraries, and it’s easy to import new photos into the wrong one.

If you struggle with multiple Photos libraries, never fear—you can merge them. Unfortunately, the process is slow, can require a lot of disk space, and may result in the loss of some metadata. You have three options: merging through iCloud Photos, using the PowerPhotos utility, and merging by exporting and importing. Each has pros and cons.

Merge through iCloud Photos

Apple’s iCloud Photos service offers the best solution for merging libraries. The trick is that whenever you designate a library as your System Photo Library, Photos automatically uploads all images that aren’t already present, adding them to the photos already in iCloud Photos. It also retains all the metadata surrounding your photos—titles, keywords, albums, facial recognition, projects, and more.

On the downside, using iCloud Photos almost certainly won’t be free unless you have so few photos that the combined library will fit within the free 5 GB of iCloud space Apple gives everyone. Almost everyone will have to pay for additional storage space ($0.99 per month for 50 GB, $2.99 for 200 GB, or $9.99 for 2 TB) for at least the month in which you’re doing the merge. iCloud Photos is a good service, so it’s likely worth paying for anyway.

More problematic is that the iCloud Photos way of merging will be very slow. If you haven’t already started using it, it could take a week or more to upload many thousands of photos. Plus, it will probably download the entire cloud-based collection of photos to each library whose photos you want to merge, so you may need a lot of local disk space too.

If you haven’t previously used iCloud Photos, go to System Preferences > iCloud and click the Options button next to Photo. In the dialog, select iCloud Photos.

Now, starting with the smallest Photos library and working up in size, follow these steps for each library you want to merge:

  1. Double-click the Photos library to open it.
  2. In Photos > Preferences > General, click Use as System Photo Library. (If it’s dimmed out, that library is already set as the System Photo Library.)
  3. Wait for photos to upload. Scroll to the bottom of the Photos view to see the progress. A Pause link will appear there during uploading—click it if you need to keep Photos from overwhelming your Internet connection. Once the photos have all uploaded, go back to Step 1 with your next Photos library.

When you’re done, the last Photos library becomes the one you’ll keep, and you can delete the others. Needless to say, make sure you have good backups first!

Merge with PowerPhotos

The $30 PowerPhotos from Fat Cat Software provides a variety of extra capabilities when working with Photos. It helps you to create and manage multiple libraries, copy photos between libraries, find duplicates, and—most important for this topic—merge libraries.

Because PowerPhotos is working entirely on your Mac’s drive, it’s fast and it doesn’t require huge amounts of extra disk space. Unfortunately, unlike the iCloud Photos approach, which brings in both originals and any edits to those photos, PowerPhotos can import only your original photos or the versions that you’ve edited, not both. Plus, it can’t merge facial recognition data, smart albums, or print projects.

PowerPhotos provides an actual interface for merging too—choose Library > Merge Libraries to start.

In the window that appears, you have four tasks:

  1. Choose source libraries. You aren’t limited to merging just two libraries; you can pick multiple sources.
  2. Choose the destination library. This is the library you want to receive all the photos. If you want, you can create a new one.
  3. Configure duplicate handling. PowerPhotos can import just one of several copies of duplicate photos, or you can bring in all the duplicates if that’s important.
  4. Choose options. PowerPhotos can merge album contents, create an album from each source library, and create a backup before merging. Most important, though, is the choice of whether to merge your original photos or the edited versions.

Merge by Exporting and Importing

This final option is conceptually simple. You export all the photos from one library and then import them into another. It’s even what Apple recommends. The main thing it has going for it is that it’s free, and it will be faster than the iCloud Photos approach. It could also be useful if you want to copy a subset of photos between libraries, rather than merging all photos.

However, as with PowerPhotos, you have to choose between original and edited photos, and you’ll need a lot of extra disk space. Even worse, you’ll lose even more metadata, including albums, faces, and print projects. And if you export as JPEG, your photos may also suffer a slight quality drop as they’re recompressed.

For those who want to use this approach, Apple provides detailed instructions. In essence, you’ll click Photos in the sidebar to see everything, and then choose Edit > Select All. Then you’ll choose File > Export and either Export X Photos (to get the edited versions of images) or Export Unmodified Original for X Photos (to get the original images). Once everything has exported, you’ll switch libraries in Photos and then drag the folder of exported images back into Photos to import it.

Our nod goes to the iCloud Photos technique, but PowerPhotos is a fine utility for those who aren’t perturbed by its limitations. Of course, don’t start any merging without making backups first, and if you need help, don’t hesitate to call us.

Social Media: If you want to merge Photos libraries to avoid having to switch back and forth, there are several approaches you can take, but each comes with pros and cons. See them all at:

8 Steps To Save Old Family Albums

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I’ve heard one too many stories of people bagging up their old family photos and albums and tossing them to the curb. It hurts my heart to see the years of family history and knowledge that these photos provide in the mix with old coffee grounds, rotting roses or last week’s tuna casserole.

The myth that future generations won’t care about these old photos prompted the mass disposal of truly invaluable family photo albums. However, in the ever-evolving digital age, old printed photos of our ancestors or relatives have become a prized treasure in the lives of young people. Photographs tell us where we came from and help give many a sense of identity. To best preserve your family’s history, here are eight ways to take care of those images and keep them out of the trash.

 

 

Store Safely

1. Store Safely. To start, I highly recommend simply placing your photo albums in archival-safe plastic bags so that the natural elements, most commonly dust and sunlight, don’t get to your photos. (More on the further organization of your photo albums later.)

If your photos already rest inside photo-safe plastic sleeves or are stuck to acid-free scrapbook paper, you don’t need to worry about taking them out of these albums. They are safe, and these plastic bags provide additional protection to your albums when they’re stored.

 

Beware of old albums
2. Beware of old albums. If your photos are in so-called magnetic albums, take them out as soon as possible! The chemicals used in these albums are highly detrimental to photos. These albums, in fact, are not magnetic but instead use an adhesive on a page in which you sandwich a photo between a sticky coating and a plastic sheet. The culprit of destruction is the highly acidic glue, which causes photos to yellow and makes them very difficult to remove.

 

Remove stuck photos (if you can

 

3. Remove stuck photos (if you can). So how do you get these photos out of the dreaded magnetic album? First, I don’t recommend using anything resembling a knife. This practice risks further damage since just one slip could slice through an entire photo.

Instead, use dental floss. Just lift one corner of your photo and gently saw the dental floss back and forth underneath until it becomes unglued. If a photo is especially difficult to peel off the sticky paper, you can use a hair dryer to heat up the glue and melt it into compliance.

Keep in mind that if the photos in these albums are more than 60 years old, the damage has likely already been done and taking them out could cause even more irreparable harm. Consider the magnetic album to be the final resting place for antique photos.

 

Jot down details
4. Jot down details. Preserving the written knowledge is just as important as preserving the actual photos. Make sure to note dates and corresponding info as you peel photos out of albums. It’s important to know the timeline of these photos as well as who or what the subjects are.

You can use index cards to record this information until you can provide a new home for your photos, or use an archival pencil to write information on the back of the photos themselves. If you find additional documents that are crucial to the story behind a photo, like notes, birth certificates or newspaper clippings, keep them with the photo so that you can place them side by side in the new album.

 

Create a digital backup.

 

5. Create a digital backup. Before putting your photos in a new nonmagnetic photo album, consider scanning them. Doing so will guarantee access to your history should an accident or the natural progression of time destroy the original prints. Once they’re scanned, you have the option to create digital scrapbooks that you can share with family and friends.

 

Compile your photos in a safe album

6. Compile your photos in a safe album. Today you have many choices for photo albums. You can still purchase traditional styles that allow you to place the actual photo in a photo-safe sleeve or a scrapbook album. If you have digitized, you photos you can easily create a digital photobook.

 

7. Make albums accessible. If you’re someone who prefers to flip through photo albums often, you can always display them around the house. Consider making a digital photo album with the scans and storing the original photos in a safe place. Bookshelves are common places to store your albums. If they’re in sight, I can guarantee that family members will find them and crowd around the photos to laugh and revel in a shared history.

 

Frame a few
8. Frame a few. Don’t forget to display some of your favorite photos! You can them hang in frames around the house, and they will undoubtedly become a favorite conversation starter. I recommend printing out the scanned version of these photos and then keeping the originals stored safely in a photo album. Poisonous UV rays are likely to creep through windows and shine upon the photos you have on display, so keep the originals safe.

If you take the steps necessary to properly preserve your family history today, future generations will also be able to take part in the joy and revelation that comes with untangling the mysteries of the past. Not only is it amusing to look back on the ludicrous trends and hairstyles, but these photos also provide a sense of connection to our past and our future. Our personal family histories connect us to the people who came before us and make sense of the world we are living in now.

 

Bio: Cathi Nelson, author of Photo Organizing Made Easy; Going from Overwhelmed to Overjoyed, is the founder of APPO (Association of Personal Photo Organizers), a membership organization dedicated to helping thousands of entrepreneurs from around the globe build successful photo preservation and organizing businesses.

4 Easy Tips To Get Photos Off Your Phone and Into Your Life

4 Easy Tips To Get Photos Off Your Phone and Into Your Life

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Our mobile phones have sadly become the final resting place for many of our family memories. Pictures of first days of school, fall adventures, family gatherings at home and other priceless moments in your family history never make it out of our mobile photo albums. This is understandable because these days we are no longer taking the allotted 36 snaps on our film cameras. Now we have the digital memory to take thousands of photos. If you take, say, 10 photos a day every day for a year, that adds up to nearly 4,000 photos left to stagnate on your digital device.

But they don’t need to be lost and unseen. In fact, organizing and clearing your phone of clutter is similar to cleaning out a disorganized closet at home. When you’re cleaning, you will wonder what made you keep certain photos for so long, much like you might wonder why you kept a sweater from high school. You will also discover some treasures, just like you will no doubt discover treasures in your closets, such as an old guitar or your grandmother’s favorite earrings. No time is better than the present to sort out the mess on your phone.

Photos off your phone

Let Go of the Photo Clutter

We truly don’t need thousands of photos. If you scroll back in your camera roll, there may very well be duplicate photos, screenshots of recipes you never used or poor-quality photos. Delete these! You want your photos to tell a story about a memory you have and keeping photos that you will never use again only adds to the clutter. And clutter is the last thing you need when it comes to photo organization.

Beginning this process may be intimidating. It’s much like opening the closet you’ve been afraid to open for years, for fear that a ton of junk will tumble out. But you’ve got to let go of the junk to get to the memories that matter most.

 

 

Time to curate + delete

Find Time to Delete

Spend time deleting photos while in line at the grocery store or set aside time once a week to delete photos. Just like the minimalist mantra, if something doesn’t bring joy, get rid of it.

 

Organize

Organize What’s Left

It takes time and computer know-how to begin the organization of your digital files, and this should also be an enjoyable process because you get to reminisce on past moments. Once you’ve sifted through which photos to keep and which photos to toss, you can begin placing the photos in folders or albums, either separated by year or by an event. This is exactly the process you might use when you are organizing your messy closet. Put winter items in one box, summer in another, and so forth.

Display Your Phone’s Photos 

Next, you’ll want to get your photos off your phone and put them on display for all to see. You can add photos to photobooks, framed wall galleries and novelty items like pillowcases and coffee mugs.

 

 

Bio: Cathi Nelson, author of Photo Organizing Made Easy; Going from Overwhelmed to Overjoyed, is the founder of APPO (Association of Personal Photo Organizers), a membership organization dedicated to helping thousands of entrepreneurs from around the globe build successful photo preservation and organizing businesses.

How To Download An Image From Hightail

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If you’ve opted for electronic delivery of your files by “FTP” or Hightail from our lab, its easy to get them downloaded to your computer.  Follow these steps:

  1.  Click on the “View All Files” link in the email.  This will take you to your images on the download page in Hightail.
  2.  Click on the “Download All” button on the right side of the page.  Your files will immediately begin downloading to your computer. When complete, your files will be in the Downloads folder.   That’s it!  Really:)  You don’t need an account and there’s no sign in required.

    Step 1: Click on the “View All Files” button in the email you receive from F-11 Photographic Supplies.

    Step 2: Click “Download All.” Your images will be in the downloads folder on your computer when complete.

 

Photos Not Syncing between Devices Properly via iCloud Photos?

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iCloud Photos (which Apple previously called iCloud Photo Library) is wonderful when it’s working. Take some photos on your iPhone, and they appear on your Mac and iPad a minute later. Delete unnecessary shots and edit the others on your Mac, and your iPhone and iPad reflect those changes almost immediately. But what if changes aren’t syncing? Photos in iOS and macOS can pause syncing for a variety of reasons, and sometimes it doesn’t restart when it should. To see if this is happening, go to the very bottom of the Photos view in Photos, where it lists the number of photos and videos you have stored. Below that number is the sync status. If it has a reason and a Resume link, click or tap Resume to start it again.

Look before You Leap with Safari’s Link Preview

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When you follow a link in Safari, you generally don’t know where you’re going to end up. That’s fine most of the time, but what if you’re concerned that a site might be trying to trick you into going somewhere malicious? Safari provides an easy way to look at the URL under a link. On the Mac, choose View > Show Status Bar, hover your pointer over the link, and look at the bottom of the window. In iOS, touch and hold a link (don’t press for 3D Touch) until a popover appears, showing the link and giving you options for opening it. The most important thing to look at is the domain—us.norton.com in the screenshots. It should match where you think you’re going, or at least look reasonable. If the URL is dubious, don’t follow the link.

Use Emergency Bypass and You’ll Never Miss a Call or Text from Important People

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There’s little worse than missing an important call or text because your iPhone was in Do Not Disturb mode or because the Mute switch was engaged. If there are certain people—a spouse, parent, or child—whose calls and texts you always want to break through the cone of silence, iOS has a solution: Emergency Bypass. When enabled for a particular contact’s ringtone or text tone, Emergency Bypass ensures the sound and vibration will happen regardless of Do Not Disturb or the Mute switch position. To set up Emergency Bypass, edit the person’s contact card in the Phone or Contacts app, tap Ringtone, and enable Emergency Bypass. You can turn on Emergency Bypass separately for calls in the Ringtone settings and for texts in the Text Tone settings. And remember, you can always set someone’s tone to None and enable a vibration instead to ensure Emergency Bypass doesn’t allow a call to interrupt a movie, play, or concert.

A Quick Trick to Turn Your iPhone into a Magnifying Glass

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It’s maddening to want to read a serial number or other bit of fine print that you can barely see. But fret no longer—your iPhone or iPad makes a fabulous magnifying glass! Assuming Magnifier is enabled in Settings > General > Accessibility > Magnifier, you can bring it up by pressing the Home button (for Touch ID devices) or side button (for Face ID devices) three times quickly. If that’s too hard to remember, you can also add a Magnifier button to Control Center in Settings > Control Center > Customize Controls. The special camera viewfinder is zoomed automatically, but you can change the zoom level with the slider, tap the flash icon to turn on the LED light (if available on your device), enable a filter to change the color or contrast, or lock the focus by tapping the lock icon. You can also freeze the image by tapping the white shutter button, which is great for grabbing a picture of a tiny serial number on the back of some device (tap that button again to resume using Magnifier). To leave Magnifier, press the Home button or swipe up from the bottom of the screen.

What’s with All These Dialogs Saying, “SomeApp is not optimized for your Mac”?

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If you’re running macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra or macOS 10.14 Mojave, you may have seen a dialog that says an app isn’t optimized for your Mac. The message differs slightly between High Sierra and Mojave, with the High Sierra version telling you the developer needs to update the app to improve compatibility whereas Mojave saying bluntly that the app won’t work with future versions of macOS.

What’s going on here, what should you do, and when should you do it?

What’s Going On: 32-bit and 64-bit Apps

Over a decade ago, Apple started to transition all the chips used in Macs, along with macOS itself, from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture. Without getting into technical details, 64-bit systems and apps can access dramatically more memory and enjoy significantly faster performance.

Apple knew it would take years before most people were running 64-bit hardware and 64-bit-savvy versions of macOS, so it allowed macOS to continue running older 32-bit apps. However, maintaining that backward compatibility has a cost, in terms of both performance and testing, so at its Worldwide Developer Conference in 2017, Apple warned developers that High Sierra would be the last version of macOS to support 32-bit apps “without compromise.” At the next WWDC in June 2018, Apple announced that macOS 10.14 Mojave would be the last version of macOS to run 32-bit apps.

Happily, the only “compromise” for 32-bit apps in Mojave is the warning dialog, which appears every 30 days when you launch an older app. But the writing is on the wall: 32-bits apps will cease working in macOS 10.15.

How Do You Identify 32-bit Apps?

Apple provides a tool to help you find 32-bit apps. Follow these steps:

  1. From the Apple menu, choose About This Mac and then click the System Report button.
  2. In the System Information utility that opens, scroll down to Software in the sidebar and select Applications. It may take a few minutes to build the list of every app on all mounted drives.
  3. When it finishes, click the 64-bit column header (No means 32-bit; Yes means 64-bit) to sort the list, and select an app to see its details in the bottom pane.

This technique works in both High Sierra and Mojave, but in Mojave, System Information includes a better-formatted section, called Legacy Software, that also provides a list of 32-bit apps. However, this list may be smaller because it includes only those apps that you’ve launched. Since it’s likely that you open old 32-bit apps only occasionally, you can’t trust the Legacy Software list to be complete.

If you find System Information’s Applications list overwhelming, check out the free 32-bitCheck utility from Howard Oakley. It performs exactly the same task but lets you focus on a particular folder and save the results to a text file for later reference.

What’s Your Next Step?

Once you know which apps won’t work in macOS 10.15, you can ponder your options. Luckily, you have some time. We expect Apple to release macOS 10.15 in September 2019, but you don’t need to upgrade right away—in fact, we recommend that you wait a few months after that to allow Apple time to fix bugs.

That said, we do encourage upgrading eventually, and if you buy a new Mac after September 2019, it will come with macOS 10.15. So you need to establish a plan—it’s better to know what you’re going to do than to be forced into action if you have to replace your Mac on short notice. For each 32-bit app on your Mac, you have three options:

  • Delete it: It’s not uncommon to have old apps that you haven’t used in years and won’t miss. There’s no need to waste drive space on them in macOS 10.15.
  • Upgrade it: Apps in active development will likely have a new version available. The main questions are how much the upgrade will cost and if there are compatibility issues associated with upgrading. You can upgrade at any time, although it’s likely worth waiting until you’re ready to move to macOS 10.15 to minimize costs. The apps that cause the most irritation here are things like the Adobe Creative Suite—Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign—that require switching to a monthly subscription.
  • Replace it: If no upgrade is available, the cost of upgrading is too high, or upgrading comes with other negatives, it’s time to look for an alternative. This can take some time, so it’s worth starting soon to ensure that the replacement will provide the features you need before macOS 10.15 forces the decision.

Needless to say, if you’d like recommendations about how to proceed with any particular app or workflow, get in touch with us!

Social Media: Have you seen dialogs warning that an app isn’t optimized for your Mac? Here’s what’s going on, what you should do, and when you should do it: