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How to create custom greeting cards in Photos for Mac

How to create custom greeting cards in Photos for Mac

Photos for Mac makes it ridiculously fun to create custom greeting cards and yearly newsletters. As you may expect from any Apple product, the cards you create in Photos are extremely high quality and thus perfect for any occasion. Cards can be folded or flat—if you’ve got extra dough, you can opt for letterpress, wherein each letter and image is physically pressed into textured paper. There’s no minimum order for cards, either. You can order one or 100. On the other hand, there aren’t any quantity discounts, but the cards do come beautifully packaged with matching envelopes… click here to read the full tutorial on Macworld.com.

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How to create instant slideshows in Photos for Mac and iOS

When it comes to showing off your pictures and videos, nothing beats a great slideshow. Seeing your digital memories overtake your entire screen, set in motion through smooth animations and transitions, complete with background music, is a uniquely personal cinematic experience. Happily, the Photos application makes creating slideshows a snap both on your Mac and on your iOS devices. We’re not talking slideshow projects, wherein you spend hours crafting every single slide, oh heck no.

Filters for Photos: new free app and extension for Photos for Mac

Example images from Macphun's Filters for Photos

Today Macphun released Filters for Photos, a free app and extension for Photos for Mac. Whether you use it as a standalone app or as an extension inside Apple's Photos app, you get 30 impressive one-click filters for your images. How can they give it away for free? Well, you get 15 filters without registering with Macphun, but if you sign up for their newsletter you get an additional 15 filters. Very clever — and everyone wins!

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Understanding basic image file formats

Chances are good that you’ve witnessed a wide variety of file formats flit across your screen, but do you really understand what they mean? For example, you may understand that a JPEG is for pictures but what’s a PNG and a TIFF? And which format supports an image with a see-through background? In this column, you’ll get answers to those questions and more... click here to read the full story on Macworld.com

New book: The Skinny on Holiday Photo Gifts

The Skinny on Holiday Photo Gifts

Make memorable and personalized gifts using your own photos! This step-by-step $5.99 book helps you create myriad gifts such as Pillows, Tote bags, Purses, Magnets & stickers, Canvas prints, Skins for laptops and portable devices, Postage stamps, Mugs, Keychains, Playing cards, Tree ornaments, Dry-erase calendars, Notepads, and Wine and beer bottle labels. You’ll also learn how to create spectacular cards and personalized calendars in Apple’s Photos for Mac and iPhoto. Then, you’ll learn step-by-step instructions for creating unique, do-it-yourself projects such as photo napkin rings, photo gift tags and wooden photo cubes. Along the way, you’ll also learn many valuable tips for improving the overall look of your projects, including: adjusting the color of your photos so they harmonize together, how to save your files for successful printing, the best ways to add text to photos, how to remove color from parts of your photo, and unusually impressive card designs.

How to create a custom calendar in Photos for Mac

There’s nothing like printing your own photography, though adorning your walls with your own art can be intimidating. A safe way to print—and thus enjoy—your digital memories is to create a calendar in Photos for OS X. At 13 by 10.4 inches, Apple’s calendars are big and printed on thick, high-quality paper so they look better than the ones you get anywhere else.

How to use keywords as a star-rating system in Apple Photos for OS X

One of Apple Photos’ most powerful features for tagging pictures is keywords. They let you apply any number of descriptive words such as “food,” “vacation,” “kickboxing,” or “kitties” to your images and videos. By searching for text included in the keywords you apply—using the search field or a smart album—you can locate specific pictures and videos quickly, regardless of which album, moment, collection, or year they’re in. Since Apple hasn’t yet seen fit to include a star-rating system in Photos (even in version 1.2), keywords may become your new best friend.

How to create shared albums in Photos for Mac and iOS


iCloud Photo Sharing is a wonderfully private way to share digital memories with certain people. When you create or subscribe to a shared album, it appears on all of your devices. And since iCloud Photo Sharing doesn’t count against your allotted storage space for free iCloud accounts, it doesn’t cost you a penny...click here to read the full story on Macworld.com

How to set up family sharing in Photos

If more than one Mac- or iOS device-using person lives under your roof—or if you share your Mac with one or more people—using Photos in a family situation can be a complicated affair. Because you can’t share Photos libraries across a network, you quickly end up with multiple libraries (one for each Mac user account) and nobody remembers which pictures live where. It’s a nightmare; but fortunately, Apple has a solution... click here to read the full story on Macworld.com

Smart uses for smart albums in Photos for OS X

While it may be satisfying for the OCD within you to manually organize your digital mementos into albums in Photos, you can automate the process using smart albums. These albums self-populate based on criteria you set, so when Photos detects an image that matches your criteria, it’s automatically added to the smart album (just like iTunes’ smart playlists). Smart albums are insanely handy. For example, you can create one that collects all the pictures you take that include a certain keyword, say, comicon, that fall within a certain date range and that are tagged as favorites.

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