Mac Photos Hacks

These hacks cover everything from lighting, to lenses, to soft boxes, to tripods, and much more. Some of them are more involved and complex than others, but I’m sure you will find at least a few that interest you. For more photography hacks, tutorials, tips, and inspiration please follow us at Pinterest. For more DIY ideas please see these posts. Mac Tips; Whether you want to edit photos, compress files, play games, or DJ your next party, there's a free Mac app that can help you out. But things can get annoying real fast if you download a lot of free apps from the Mac App Store, since you have to type in your Apple ID password each time.

Privacy is something we often take for granted until it is gone. Ask yourself this – do you have photos that you would not want to be viewed by someone else? Most people would answer yes, which makes it all the more surprising that more of us don’t take the necessary measures to ensure that our private pictures are secure.

Keep your personal photos private on macOS

Today we’re going to show you how easy it is to hide pictures on a Mac by looking at some of the most popular and useful tips for keeping your pictures locked away.
We begin with hands-on tips and build up to the photo hiding app, Hider 2.

How to hide picture folders manually

There are a few manual ways to keep your private photos away from someone who has access to your Mac. These methods may not provide the full privacy solution but combined, may give you enough security to feel comfortable.

We’re going to skip obvious and time-consuming options like renaming and moving folders so that they don’t sound like they contain anything “interesting”.

Instead, let’s begin with the macOS Photos app, which has the functionality to “hide” photos, although it has a very different idea of what “hidden” truly means. When you select photos, simply right click and choose to hide them. Now they will not appear in your photo stream.

While this may be sufficient if you’re showing someone your photo collection, it is not going to stop someone who has access to your Mac. To view these items and unhide them, all you have to do is go to View > Show Hidden Photo Album.

Very convenient for you. But unfortunately also very convenient for someone else using your system.

A hidden feature to hide pictures

A lot of people don’t know that it is possible to create multiple photo libraries on one system. Simply hold the Option key (alt) when launching the Photos app. This will launch a dialog asking you to select from a list of photo libraries or create a new library. This new secret library can even be set up on an external drive.

To choose this library all you have to do is hold the Option key when launching the app and select it from the list. It won’t stop a dedicated hacker but it will prevent kids and co-workers from stumbling across photos they shouldn’t see.

Or lock photos by encrypting everything!

Another option is the macOS app, FileVault 2. The solution offered by this app is very limited but may be enough considering your personal photo privacy needs.

FileVault 2 will encrypt your entire system drive, including photos, but this will only safeguard your system when your Mac is turned off. As soon as it turns on and you enter your password, your drive is unencrypted.

What this means is that co-workers and hackers could still access your private photos after you’ve logged in, so it’s mainly a security feature to prevent someone who has stolen your Macbook from getting at your data.

Mac photos has duplicates

Another restriction is that you can only encrypt your system drive, so if you have photos on another internal or external drive, FileVault isn’t going to be of much help.

Here’s how to turn FileVault on:

  1. Log in to macOS with an account that has admin privileges
  2. Navigate to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault
  3. Click the padlock in the lower left corner and enter your admin password
  4. Turn on FileVault
  5. Copy the recovery key and put it somewhere safe
  6. Your system will now reboot, and once you have signed in, your drive will encrypt for the first time

Note – The first encryption could take hours. You can use your Mac during the process.

Better yet, get specialized hide photo help

FileVault will encrypt your entire disk but what if you just want to hide a few specific pictures or hide a single gallery? macOS may have some useful tools to help lock away your private pictures, but they can't compare to an app developed specifically for this purpose. Hider 2 is an actual photo hider app, and it ticks all the boxes - ease of use, functionality, integration, and powerful security.

Once installed, Hider 2 integrates with macOS to such a degree that it feels like it was always a part of your system. Now, hiding photos, hiding galleries, even hiding other types of files, becomes as easy as dragging whatever you want to hide to the Hider 2 app icon, or right-clicking on files to add them that way. Compared to the effort needed for the manual methods, this is simply the quickest way to hide photos.

It’s not just about ease of use as the app offers a high level of security thanks to AES - 256 encryption, which ensures that not only are your photos hidden from prying eyes, they also are safe and secure from dedicated hackers.

What does it take to keep your images safe?

Once you hide pictures, photo galleries and anything else you want to secure, you can group and organize your files in the app to make finding what you need as easy as can be. Hider 2 is even integrated with Finder so that tag searches on your photos will also work.

Hider 2 essentially operates like a secret, secure room. When you’re in the room you can work as easily as you would with photos and files that aren’t hidden, and when you’re done, you simply close the door by toggling the app off. At that point everything inside that room disappears until you enter the app with your password again.

Having private pictures is natural, so the solution for hiding them should be just as natural. While macOS provides a smattering of picture hiding and encrypting options, they just can’t compare to a dedicated photo hide app like Hider 2.

Try it today to take control of your private life before someone else does.

Sep 24, 2018 — Managing a huge gallery and organizing photos is a tricky business, even if you’re generally tidy, so it’s always a good idea to use some help. Especially when there’s software out there designed specifically to deal with an overload of pictures.

The only trouble with professional photo organizing software is that, much like any photo equipment, it’s painfully expensive. In this article we’ll suggest tools that tame your giant photo gallery without leaving a hole in your pocket.

Best photo organizing software for Mac, as of 2018

Gemini 2: The duplicate photo finder

Mac Photos Has Duplicates

The first thing you need to do to organize photos is remove the extras. There’s a high chance you’ve got plenty of duplicates and similar images — 15 shots from slightly different angles, for instance. You usually only use one of those, so there’s really no point in keeping them all.

Mac Cosmetics Photos

The easiest way to get rid of those files is to get a duplicate photo finder, such as Gemini 2. It can scan your whole gallery, locate duplicates and point out similars. It usually takes a few minutes to clean your whole photo collection, so download Gemini and give it a quick test drive.

Photos: Mac’s native photo organizer app

Here’s the biggest secret to good photo organization: master Photos. You might be thinking: seriously, a native Apple app is any good? And you’d be surprised how much it is.

Since macOS Sierra, Photos has been getting makeovers and new features. In macOS Mojave, the app lets you organize content just by dragging-and-dropping it, and with Smart Albums, you can instantly group photos by date, camera, and even the person in them. At this point, it’s just a really good piece of photo management software.

Mylio: A free photo manager app

If you’ve been meaning to consolidate your photos in one place for years, Mylio will help you do just that. When you first start using the app, it offers to look for your photos on the current device, on an external drive, and even on your Facebook.

Once all the photos you’ve taken in your lifetime are imported, Mylio organizes into a variety of views. The coolest one is Calendar, showing you photo collections on an actual calendar. That way, you’ll quickly find the photos from your son’s first birthday, even if you forgot how you named the folder. Plus, Mylio offers a free mobile app, so you can access your photo library wherever you are.

Final word on photo management on Mac

Mac Photos Review

There are basically two things you need to remember to bring order into your photographing life:

  1. Before you get to organization and management, be sure to unclutter your photo library. The easiest way to do it is with a duplicate finder, such as Gemini 2. Otherwise you'll be rummaging around in thousands of photos you don't even need.
  2. Photos, the native Apple photo manager can accomplish everything you need to make organizing photos into groups and categories easy.
  3. Third-party tools can provide you with added functionality that’s missing in native macOS tools, like calendar view or managing photos right in the Finder.

Now that you know all the secrets to photo organization, Mac photography shouldn’t be that hard or that expensive. Not when you’ve got the right tricks up your sleeve.

Mac Makeup Photos

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