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Calling all Mac boffins...

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Ganesh

16:50 / 09.10.05

Keith & Sentimentity: it was set to Region 1; it's now Region 2 and playing DVDs.

*wobbly voice*

I love you.

16:52 / 09.10.05

Apple: Bringing People Together... Through Frustration.

Cheers and huggles all 'round.

Ganesh

16:55 / 09.10.05

With the photo thing, though:

You can put any photos you want into your iPhoto library, simply by saving it into that directory. In addition, when you right-click or control-click an image in your browser, "Save to iPhoto Library" is an option.

When I right-click (or control-click) on an image, the only options I get are

Open image in new window
Save to desktop

and

Copy image.

Keith, like a scientist

17:04 / 09.10.05

i've been using Macs for years and I'm still continually mystified by iPhoto.

i think you can open the program and import your photos into it. In fact...yeah. Ok, I'm opening it now...If your camera is connected, open iPhoto and go to File > Import. That should work. But beyond that, I've never exactly "got" iPhoto very well.

Apple's Help is usually pretty good for stuff like that. If you open iPhoto, just go to Help and open it up...should be able to find the basics of doing what you want in it.

P. Horus Rhacoid

17:13 / 09.10.05

Ganesh- It's kind of annoying, but you can control-click and "download image to disk", open iphoto, then drag and drop the pic into the library. You can then delete the original pic- iphoto makes a copy.

Ganesh

17:37 / 09.10.05

Yeah, I can import my own photos no problem; it's importing and manipulating other images that's tricky. Have now mastered the technique of Saving To Desktop then dragging into iPhotolibrary (then deleting from desktop), which is a bit of a fankle but not too bad.

Cropping remains a bit of a pisser, and resizing doesn't seem straightforward at all. Resizing seems to happen automatically in some situations but not in others: when I was attempting to create an avatar for use on another board, it proved near-impossible to crop 'n' shrink the bit I wanted.

I think I may end up saving for Mac Photoshop...

P. Horus Rhacoid

18:39 / 09.10.05

Cropping's pretty simple- double click the photo in your library you want to edit. It'll then take up the entire space and your cursor will turn into a cross. Just click and drag the box around part you want to crop, then click the crop button.

It looks like there's no way to resize images within iPhoto, but you can resize them as you export them. Select an image or images (shift-click on the thumbnails) then file-export. A window will pop up- click on the 'file export' tab and you can resize there. It'll automatically keep the same aspect ratio. I'm not entirely sure what the other tabs are for.

lekvar

19:05 / 09.10.05

Ganesh, if you're looking for something to get you through, Graphic Converter isn't as polished as PhotoShop, but it's cheap ($30) and has a demo you can try. Not suitable for high-end graphics work, but it gets the job done.

Smoothly, for viewing media, I'd recommend VLC. It can play anything, .WMV, .MOV., .MP3, RealMeadia, couches, lint... it works for just about anything you can download. I don't know about viewing media embedded in webpages though. If you can get ant plugins that reliably play embedded .WMV files, could you share?

w1rebaby

19:14 / 09.10.05

If you want a graphics program that will let you deal with photos: I use the Gimp as my main one, which does all that and more. It's not quite the open-source Photoshop killer that it's sometimes portrayed as but it's extremely powerful and I'm happy with it.

There's still no need to get Photoshop if you don't want to use that; Photoshop Elements will do everything that you ever wanted to do with a photo. That's pretty cheap. And I have a copy of PSE v2 which I can give you if you want it, since I don't use it. You can always pirate it of course.

The other thing that I use is ImageMagick, which you use via the command line (Terminal) - typing "convert oldphoto.jpg -resize 500 -quality 75 newphoto.jpg" is a lot faster than opening up a whole application to do a simple resize. If anyone's interested I can post details about how to install that. There's a Windows version as well that works the same way.

Smoothly

19:26 / 09.10.05

Lekvar - Windows Media Player 9 for OS X seems to do the trick. Although, in Firefox, I do get a ghost of the player in other tabs when an embedded video is playing in one.

w1rebaby

19:26 / 09.10.05

Oh yeah, seconding VLC; I use a combination of that, MPlayer and occasionally Xineplayer. I prefer the interface of VLC but sometimes MPlayer is better; if that won't play something I'll try Xine, and if Xine won't play it it's not going to play on anything.

Apart from some WMV files. The OS X WMP client will not play every WMV file out there. Sorry. Contact whoever sent you the file and say "stop using these shitty proprietorial formats".

20:07 / 09.10.05

When I right-click (or control-click) on an image, the only options I get are

Open image in new window
Save to desktop

and

Copy image.

Oh. I'm using Safari as my browser. What're you using?

mondo a-go-go

14:59 / 11.10.05

Actually, I have a question about iPhoto, too. Is there any way I can reorganise the keywords so that they're in alphabetical order? Because the only way I can figure out how to sort them is to delete them and make new ones in a more useful order, rather than the random order they're listed in now. I have about 180 keywords assigned to over 600 photos (and increasing), though, so it'll be a real hassle if I have to start over with them all!

06:51 / 12.10.05

One-man clique: as for the port 80 chat problem, you might want to check out meebo, which is a web interface that works with AIM, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, and MSN. It's still in alpha mode, so it's not perfect, but it does work.

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