I hope you all got through the winter okay, and are looking forward to warmer weather when it arrives. In previous years I’ve offered a class on cleaning up your Mac, which seems go with the spring season. I thought I’d write to offer a couple of easy tips to help you bring order to your computer.
Tip #1: DECLUTTER YOUR DESKTOP
If you feel like your desktop is cluttered, make sure you’re in the Finder, go up to the “View” menu and select “Use Stacks.” This will organize everything into piles (or stacks), by type or kind, like documents, screen shots, pictures, and PDF files. Keep in mind, if you don’t like the results of this, you can easily undo it by going back to the “View” menu and unchecking “Use Stacks.”
Tip #2: DE-DUPLICATE YOUR PHOTOS
One of the main cleaning-up tasks people ask me to help them with is getting rid of duplicate photos. Until a recent update to MacOS Ventura and iOS 16, this required the use of third-party programs to automate finding duplicates in your library. Now, this capability is built into the Photos app on both your iPhone and computer. Simply open Photos and look at the sidebar on the left side (or under Utilities, under Albums, on your iPhone). You will see a new entry there called “Duplicates.” Click on this and a list of all your duplicates will appear, along with an option to merge them. You can do this one at a time or all at once. It will automatically keep the best and highest resolution of your duplicate images.
Another “spring cleaning” activity to consider is finding and dealing with other duplicate files hiding in the nooks and crannies of your computer. If you’d like my help with this, or want to learn how to use the not-so-obvious searching features on your Mac to locate duplicate or missing files, please get in touch.
ANOTHER SCAM ALERT
As always, please keep an eye out for scams. Just this week, someone on this list bought a printer, googled HP tech support for help setting it up, and ended up clicking on a fake website pretending to be HP. They nearly got conned into paying $500 for “lifetime tech support.” Please don’t do this. If you are ever in a situation like this and need my help as quickly as possible, texting is always the surest way to reach me.
P.S. Some of you already follow me on Instagram, but if you’d like to see, among other things, what I’ve been finding while metal detecting in the meadow from the photo above, please follow me on Instagram. I’d love to see you there.