Image Capture
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How to autoimport your iPhone photos using OS X's Image Capture
Image Capture for OS X has been around for a long time, but many new Mac users are not aware of the photo importing tool. The handy utility sits in the "Other" folder in Launch Pad or in the Applications folder and can be used to import your iPhone photos. It bypasses other photo apps like Aperture or iPhoto and can be used to manually copy photos from your iPhone to a folder on your Mac's hard drive. By default, Image Capture will open and prompt you to choose the photos and the folder location for that session. If you want to automate the process, you can change the import options for Image Capture. This is useful for folks who want a minimal effort way to backup their iPhone photos. Connect your iPhone to your Mac via USB Make sure the iPhone is selected in Image Capture On the bottom left corner of Image Capture, there is a drop down list with the label "Connecting this iPhone opens:" Select this list and choose "Autoimporter" from the list of applications Close Image Capture and disconnect your iPhone The next time you connect your iPhone, the Image Capture app will send your files immediately to a folder within "/Pictures" on your Mac. You then can use Finder to sort those images and move them to their final destination.
Mac 101: Use Image Capture to clear off old iPhone pictures
Last year, Macworld posted an update of an old trick from blogger Colin Devroe, which allows you to use your Mac to selectively remove photos from an iPhone or iPad without having to sync the device or download images. To do this, just launch Image Capture. Image Capture sees your iPhone or iPad as a camera, just like iPhoto does. Unlike iPhoto, though, it doesn't make you import the images to your hard drive before you can delete them. To delete images off your iPhone, either select all of or do command-click to choose the ones you want to remove. Delete by hitting the red "no" button next to the import location on the bottom menu bar. You can use Image Capture to upload iPhone photos to a different location. Say you've captured screenshots and want them in a certain folder on your external drive and not in iPhoto. You can do that using Image Capture. Image Capture also provides in-depth data about your images, including date and time, location, aperture, focal length, shutter speed, ISO, location and if the flash was used. It's the sort of data you'll find when looking at the file in iPhoto, Aperture or another photo-management software, but it's still neat to see this at a glance.
The Daily Grind: What do you look for when taking screenshots?
There's an art to taking a cool screenshot, an art that I'm sadly not very good at. I never seem to be able to take good shots in combat, and my attempts at picking out perfect environments are pretty much nonexistent. The one thing I can do is ensure that whether I'm in Final Fantasy XIV or Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have good screenshots of my characters looking cool. I've paused what I'm doing in-game on occasion just to make sure that I can line up a nice character shot perfectly. Of course, some people can find perfect angles for landscapes. Some people look for a funny glitch or a strange character type. And some people just find the right art to capture an intense battle in one moment. What do you look for when you're taking a screenshot? Do you go to great lengths to set up the right shot, or do you just have a knack for getting a certain picture type just right? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
DARPA's new Space Surveillance Telescope will keep our satellites safe from interstellar debris
What's that in the sky? A bird? A plane? Oh, it's just some junk floating around in space, posing major threats to our military's spy satellites. To help keep an eye on it, engineers at DARPA, MIT and the Air Force have unleashed a new $110 million telescope that's been in the works for nine years now. The new Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) is capable of delivering wide-angle views of the Earth's firmament thanks to a curved CCD. This allows for a massive 3.5m aperture and f/1.0 exposure settings, capturing more light in a day that your average scope can in a week. As part of the Air Force's Space Surveillance Network (SSN), the telescope's primary task will be to look out for any microsatellites, meteors or other alien droppings moving at the same speed at which the Earth rotates. The system developed its first images earlier this year and the Air Force may eventually place SSTs all over the world, creating a 360-degree surveillance blanket and going a long way toward keeping our spycraft warm, cozy, and safe from galactic hazards.
Set AutoImporter's preferences for cameras and iOS devices
When I plug in my SD card, I want one thing to happen: "Get my pictures (and videos) off this card as quickly as possible." I don't necessarily want to import them to iPhoto or do anything else with them right away. I just want them moved from Point A (the SD card) to Point B (a folder on my Mac). Ideally, I would like for each device to have its own folder because I don't want pictures from my iPad (screenshots, saved images from the internet, etc.) mixed in with family vacation pictures from my real camera. Fortunately, there is an easy way to do this in Snow Leopard if you take a few minutes to set things up the right way.
Mac 101: Stop the iPhone from opening iPhoto
More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. I love iPhoto. I use it for most of my photo editing. The thing I don't like about iPhoto is how it opens each and every time I connect my iPhone to my Mac. What strikes my as plain silly is that, since the introduction of the iPhone two and a half years ago, Apple has not built in an option in the iTunes iPhone status window to disable the automatic iPhoto launch every time you plug in your iPhone. If you want to take control of this behavior, and you'd prefer to stick with Apple's built-in tools (rather than take advantage of the free and easy Cameras prefpane) there is good news: there's a simple way to disable this 'feature' and it doesn't involve command line stuff. Even better, it isn't an "all or nothing" solution – eg: you can still have iPhoto automatically open when you connect your camera, but not have it open when you connect your iPhone. Aron mentioned this approach a few months ago but I thought it would be helpful to walk through it in detail. It should be noted that this solution only works on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you are running 10.5 or earlier, you'll have to use one of the solutions noted above; we recommend the free Cameras preference pane as a quick fix. You'll see the image above is of iPhoto's preferences. You may think the option of disabling iPhone auto-open is in there, but it's not. To stop the iPhone from opening iPhoto you actually need to launch the Image Capture application. Step 1: Launch Image Capture (Applications>Image Capture). If your iPhone isn't plugged in already, plug it in to the USB port on your Mac. It should then show up in the devices source list. Step 2: Make sure you have the iPhone selected in the source list. When you do, you should see any photos you have on the iPhone appear in the right-hand column of the Image Capture application. Step 3: At the bottom of the source list, you'll see your iPhone's name then, below that, you'll see the words "Connecting this iPhone opens:" and a drop-down menu. Select "No application." Now close the Image Capture app and you're done. No more iPhone opening up iPhoto, but your other cameras will still auto-launch iPhoto when they are connected!
Using Snow Leopard's Image Capture app, or how to clean up a room
One of the lesser-known changes in Snow Leopard is the update to the Image Capture application. This little gem of the Mac has always been available to grab photos from devices such as digital cameras and scanners, but with Mac OS X 10.6, Image Capture has turned into my personal hero. In 2007 and 2008, my in-laws both passed away and in the process of closing out their estate, we inherited many family photos. When I mean many, I'm talking about boxes and albums filled with them, enough to fill a spare bedroom in our house! Rather than just tossing the photos, we wanted to keep them because many of them were cherished family pictures, and others (taken by my father-in-law) were spectacularly good travel photographs. I've had an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner for a few years, and the software that came with it was adequate. However, I just didn't feel like I wanted to spend the time and effort to scan a bunch of photo prints, and was considering sending them off to be digitized professionally. Then, in a fortuitous experiment, I tried Image Capture 6.0. This latest version has made it possible for me to slap down a bunch of photos on my scanner without regard for orientation, and have the scanner digitize them individually for placement in a folder. All it takes is making sure to check the Detect Separate Items checkbox, and Image Capture analyzes the overview scan to pick out the individual photos, straighten them out, and save them to a folder, auto-numbering them in the process. Once I've digitized a large batch, I drop them into a folder on my wife's MacBook Pro, where they're dragged into iPhoto, tagged, edited, and organized. The originals? They go into the trash. Image Capture is faster than the Epson software that came with the scanner, it allows me to scan a lot of photos very quickly while working on other things on my Mac (like writing TUAW posts), and it's making it possible for me to burn through digitizing thousands of prints without spending thousands of dollars using commercial scanning services. The best part of this entire project is that in the process of converting atoms to bits, we're going to recapture some space in our home. Your mileage may vary depending on the scanner model you're using, but if you haven't given the Snow Leopard edition of Image Capture a try, check it out.
Mac 101: Camera-specific application launching
Courtesy molenlavapit.com If you're the proud owner of a multi-camera/single Mac household then you've probably run into the problem of what happens when you plug in a camera not necessarily being what you intended. For instance, my wife used to have an issue where iPhoto would always launch when she plugged in her iPhone. This was because her Canon camera launched iPhoto whenever it was plugged in via USB. Creig Sherburne has discovered that in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, however, camera/application management woes are tackled via an Apple utility that comes with the system. The latest iteration of Image Capture (version 6.0 at least) includes a preference setting for specifying which application to launch when connecting a camera. There's an even option for having no application launch, which is a nice feature if your Mac is running on scarce resources and some rogue program is taking up memory when trying to open. Lest you think that by not upgrading to Snow Leopard you're in the lurch (though if you can, you should, it's only 30 bucks) fear not. There is a third-party solution for this issue; Cameras prefpane from Flexibits, which we noted back in July, beautifully (and freely!) solves this problem for Tiger and Leopard users. Got any other handy, camera-related tips? Let us know in the comments! [Via Daring Fireball]
Ask TUAW: AirPort Extreme bridge, iTunes smart playlists, USB drive backup, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly Mac troubleshooting Q&A column! This time we've got questions on using an AirPort Extreme as a wireless to ethernet bridge, automatically backing up a USB flash drive, building smart playlists in iTunes, migrating an iTunes Library and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.
What is wrong with this Picture?
Image Capture automatically launches when I attach my new iPod Touch to my Mac. The problem is, of course, that unlike the iPhone, the iPod Touch is not a camera. So why is it reporting itself as a camera to my computer? I haven't personally tried hooking it up to my Windows PC, but TUAW reader Gonzalo reports that Windows recognizes it as an imaging device.To switch this behavior off in Windows, open Control Panel > Printers and Other Hardware > Scanners and Camera > (your iPod). Right-click the iPod and pick Properties from the contextual menu. Tap on the Events tab and choose "Camera connected" from the "Select an event" pop-up and select Take No Action.
