Episode 6 – What the HEIF?

Hello and welcome to episode six of The Brew and Byte Show.

This week’s episode, “What the Heath?” is sponsored by the London Mac user group.

Join us this week for our photography special where we discuss all the latest Apple news in

the last seven days. We compare images from all the panels’ shiny new iPhones and we delve into

all things photography on the Mac. We may have even had time to answer some of your tech questions

and much much more. This evening we’ve got a number of different people on our panel.

First up, let’s say hello to Alistair.

Hello.

How are you? Have you been busy this week?

Uh, yes, slowly, but yeah, slowly picking up and getting busy.

And I’m going to hand you over to our wonderful backup king that is Martin.

Hello, good evening all. Yes, been a busy week. I got my iPhone 12 to take my photographs and

I’ve been so busy I have hardly been able to take a shot. So that’s a test for the next week to get

my photos comparisons between my old 10 and my new 12 Pro Max. And we didn’t convince him to get

a blue one in the end. Which colour did he finally go for? Well, unfortunately, EE sent me a gold one.

I had asked for the graphite and this gold phone turned up which was quite a shock.

So I rang them up and they said they could go through the return process and get me in all that sort of one.

But I’d already started setting up the phone. I thought, oh, go through it.

So in the end, I managed to persuade them to send me a, and they sent me a product red cover for it.

So I don’t have to look at the gold. It’s now bright red.

That just proves that EE doesn’t like Man-u either.

And lastly, let’s say hello to Tina. How are you?

still recouping from the operation but interestingly using my camera to help me recover. So I’ve

been filming how I walk and then I’m going to analyse what I’m doing wrong to change how I walk.

Now I’ve had money done. Perfect. Thank you. First up in the news, the UK government is blaming

Apple and fellow big tech companies for large volumes of electrical waste. Who would like to

to start discussing this topic? Well, I think this is basically talking about

not the right to repair just iPhones,

but also the bigger Apple computers.

So for example, if you buy an iMac

and the screen is perfectly okay,

but the glass in front of it is cracked

and you just want to just replace the glass.

On the previous iMacs, say the 2010, 2011 iMacs,

you could just replace the glass, because you’re about 50 quid.

The new iMacs now have the screen bonded onto the screen,

and it’s impossible to take the glass off without breaking it.

Also, the old iMacs you were held on by magnets.

And so if you were an engineer, it was very easy to take them apart from a pair.

Now it’s quite a complex job repairing it with having to take the screens off.

So I can see why they’re suggesting needing to repair stuff.

It’s quite a challenge if you’re an engineer now.

Has anyone tried to repair any of their new hardware recently?

No, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it.

As much as I like tinkering with things,

I would just take it straight back to Apple and get it sorted.

But there must be some reason behind this,

rather than just people throwing the app,

oh, Apple wanna make more money.

There must be an engineering reason

as to why they changed that policy of fixing with ASI magnet or a lesser sticky glue to

the bonding that they’re now doing. Does it do, has an effect on the screen and how the

machine performs?

I think they’re trying to get around the problem of the 2010, 27 inch iMacs which had problems.

they were sucking in air, they would suck in air between the glass panel and the screen

and you’d get sort of gray appearance on there and there was a court case taken about it in

America and then there was somewhere the blue in certain models would start turning yellow

and then you’d get these weird patterns appearing on the screen normally on the edges. So they

moved to an all-sealed unit so that would get round the court case problem. So it was

more that sort of reason. But other complex issue was the original idea of the IMAX was

that you needed to replace them because of the heat because they were conventional hard

drives. Now you move to OLSSD, they don’t want anyone to take it apart because they want to

have more highly trained engineers who know what they’re dealing with in clean rooms or

something similar, which is pushing everything to very expensive levels, especially if you’re

a school or someone that holds onto your computer for what, five, six years, it is going to get expensive.

But isn’t there a trend with most manufacturers because they’re so worried about their reliability?

I had an issue the other day, my wife said to me, “Oh, the oil winding light has come on

the car, she’s got a mini. So I said, okay, fair enough. So I opened the bonnet up, there is no

dipstick. They’ve done away with a dipstick. And if you actually look in the car, there’s nothing

for you to touch. And it’s the same with, you know, Apple are trying to defend their reputation

for reliability, pretty much ruling out no anybody other than an Apple engineer or certified engineer

going anywhere near the inside to them. But is that to do with their desperate need to keep their

reliability up?

• See, I think they are a company

that are very worried about their reputation

and they are control freaks.

So the more that they can control, the easier it is.

And given their due, there are laptops

that will last for years.

I mean, I’m using a 2004, it’s six years old

and it’s still running, I’ve bottled on Big Sur,

I’ll be honest, but it could run Big Sur and it will run Big Sur.

That’s amazing for a laptop.

So I think they’ve got the longevity

and with the longevity, people are more likely to repair it.

Whereas I think the bigger problem is the cheap laptops

that are two, 300 pounds that people just chuck away.

And to be fair to Apple, I’m sounding really fanboy now

which is a bit worrying.

They will recycle.

I think they’ve got a different way of recycling.

They don’t want things repaired.

What they want to do is you hand them in,

they’ll give you a voucher and then they will recycle them and it will go back into the system.

So I think they want to do the repairs, they want to control the process.

That’s Apple, isn’t it? They want it the Apple way or forget it?

I think the other problem here, as you mentioned earlier on Alistair, is the problem with litigation.

You know, the slightest thing that goes wrong, all of a sudden it’s a class action suit trying to,

you know, generate millions of dollars in fees for lawyers. And I think Apple just recently

settled a case, and they paid a $113 million payment over a patent dispute, patent right,

about their efforts to mess about with the battery charging system to pull back the

performance of the chip in order to protect the battery. And there was a class action case taken,

and now they’ve had to pay out, you know, nearly to them, $113 million is still peanuts, isn’t it?

But I think it is, it’s this litigation. And as you said, Tina, they’re so desperate to maintain

their, you know, deserved reputation for reliability and quality. How many times have you read, oh,

an Apple phone catches fire? Why? Because it had a cheap nasty repair done on it.

My view to that was that I think, as you said, Martin,

I think Apple are concerned about cheap knockoff components

being used in their products,

which puts their brand at risk.

And also the consumer, if you’ve got a cheap battery

that’s been put in there and it doesn’t work correctly,

there could easily be an accident waiting to happen.

• There was a whole issue.

Do you remember about the changing the privacy button

on the phones?

If you change that, even if you bought a new part,

phone still would not work because it has to be registered and had to be reprogrammed.

Otherwise, again, people could steal a phone, get one, get a cheap part, change the reader

and now they could sell your phone as a second hand phone.

So I think there’s like everything, there’s two sides of every story here and I think

it’s not quite as straightforward as they’re making out.

I would like to, of course, Apple and Notoriously quiet about stuff like this, I would like to

have more explanation from them as to why they have these so-called policies which look on the

face of it to be just another part of the Apple tax that you pay for being in the Apple system.

Well, there’s also the other thing which seems odd though. If you look at the new iPhones which

are being released, they’re being sold with a cable which has got lightning on one end,

in USB-C on the other. Now everyone who’s bought phones, whether it be Apple or Android or whoever,

have got USB-A on the end, not USB-C. So Apple are forcing people to ditch a perfectly good plug

and buy a brand new plug which will incur shipping costs and environmental costs purely because they

think that’s the new system. Now that has nothing to do with the person not wanting to charge what

what they’ve got already. It’s basically Apple saying this is what you’re now going to use.

And you mentioned earlier, this is very similar to like the car industry. Citroen tried it

in the 70s by making everything in peculiar tool measurements. And the question you should

really ask yourself is it’s not necessarily Europe, which is where we’re going to have

the problem. If you’re in somewhere like New Zealand, there’s not a single Apple store

in the entire country. You have to send it to Australia to get it repaired. So you’re

saying, right, if you’re in New Zealand, you’re not allowed to get it done. You have to send it to

Australia. That’s ridiculous. Or you have to pay the extortionate cost to repair stuff. If you’re

buying from Apple Direct, that’s the other problem I found as an engineer. You only have to look at

Lewis Rosman on YouTube to see why he doesn’t do Apple repairs with Apple costs because the cost of

the Apple parts is so closely high in comparison to the component, which is broken. He’s a very

talented engineer who can repair motherboards but can’t work any Apple

still because they say you have to replace the entire motherboard. He says

it’s only a 20 cents component which is gone. If you’re a certified Apple

technician do you have access to official Apple components or not? No you

have to meet so I was Apple certified technician but it expires every year and

And we looked into it for the company I worked for.

You have to have new UK white walls.

You have to spend,

you have to, your company has to be only Apple.

It can’t be Apple and PC or Android.

At the time you had to have 5,000 pounds worth of money

designated just to Apple.

You had to meet their sort of brand styling.

Now that can be very difficult.

The people in your area win those users as well.

They’re also very concerned about controlling what happens to the old parts

because we have an iMac, the Fusion Drive, and in common with several other iMacs

with Fusion Drives, the Fusion Drive failed.

We didn’t use Apple.

We used another company, but an authorised reseller.

And then we had masses of concerns because actually they replace the Fusion Drive,

we paid for it, blah, blah, blah.

But when we said, but you told us we could have our fusion drive back,

because what we were concerned about was the data that was on that drive.

I said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we have to send that back to Apple.

And that that was really interesting because somewhere there’s a drive

which hopefully has been wiped securely with our data on it.

And that was a massive concern.

So I think that’s the other thing by limiting the number of companies

that can do authorized repairs.

It’s a control thing again.

But you’ve got the other problem.

I mean, the amount of times I’ve had stuff come from the one of London’s Apple stores

to our store because there was no way in the Apple store to back up the data.

So they come to the store, back it up with us, then take it back to Apple to get the

repair done on it.

And it’s because Apple, to comply with the UK data protection rules, have said, “Okay,

we’re not going to store any data of any kind in any of our stores in the UK,” which is

okay, fair, I understand.

But what happens if you need to back up that data because the drive is failing and your

backup drive, which you bought at the same time, is also failing?

Then I think at that point, I need to refer you back to one of the various shows where

we went through about backups.

You’ve got have enough backups.

Back up, back up, back up.

• On that topic, should we jump into our major feature

of this evening, which is photography?

So we’re going to start with photography on iPhone.

And if I’m not wrong, I believe we’re now all officially

Apple Upgraders this week,

because we’ve all received a new phone of some kind.

And who would like to start talking

about their photos they’ve taken?

• I’ll start because I have very little to report.

I haven’t had a chance to really go off

and take some in depth photographs.

I wanna do some comparisons with my old 10,

with my 12 Pro.

So until I really get that done, incomplete,

I can’t really comment.

Other than the fact it looks superb,

the photographs I’ve seen off of it so far are great.

And the one outstanding point I can talk about

is if you’re taking video in low light,

the LiDAR sensor will keep it in focus.

that old problem where I used to hunt around trying to find something to focus on and it would go in and out of focus

The new LiDAR is really good in that respect. Brilliant. I’ve done the iPhone 12 Pro

And I’m upgrading from the 10 so one of the things I have looked at is

Taking a portrait picture on where they defocus the background ironically ever plant

What’s interesting is it’s really bossy

Yeah, it says things like move your camera close and move it further away

It really wants to tell you how to get a blurred background, but the photos I like them the nice

And previously I had an app on my 10 that sort of did that, but it was a little bit

Hit and miss

The other thing that I am doing so at the moment

Apologies for the self-obsessed. Hey, I’ve got a new me thing, but

I’m using the video

And that’s really interesting because we did it my sister’s nagging me so we I did a slow-mo video

Of me walking

Okay, not very exciting

But it was really clever because actually I could analyze my gate and I could analyze my walk

But it was actually far more useful than I thought it was just shut my sister up to be honest

Let’s hope she doesn’t listen to this podcast

But I could look at how I was walking. I could look at whether I was moving from side to side

So although I did it to keep people quiet. It was really useful

So I’ve actually amended how I walk because I’m now more aware of what I’m doing wrong

So it’s helping me in my recovery. Hopefully

So that’s good

Martin didn’t you mention something about you’ve realized that the new camera really deals well with motion

So you’ve got less of the motion blur

Yes, I was looking at the self-stabilization. In the Pro Max, it’s a different form of

stabilization. It stabilizes the sensor rather than the optics. And it seems to do it very well.

I was walking and jogging through, I know people are going to laugh when I mentioned

me here the word jogging, but I actually was out doing some jogging and we were taking

some pictures of our friend’s Labrador and trying to jog along and run along with him.

I was quite surprised afterwards about how steady the picture actually looked.

I was quite, it almost looked like it was on a DJI handheld stabilizer unit.

It was very impressive, really good.

So I upgraded from an SE Mark I to an SE 2020.

So for those who remember, the SE first generation was the equivalent of having an iPhone 6S,

and the iPhone 2020 or second generation is equivalent to having an iPhone 11.

And so I haven’t had much of an opportunity to take much photos because I was busy this

week.

I’ve taken two photos, but the difference was quite surprising.

The first photograph I took with the SE was sort of your standard sort of,

“Okay, it’s a nice photo, but nothing striking.”

You take the second one and it’s almost like someone’s gone and fiddled with it in Photoshop

because it’s more striking HDR color and slightly brighter image.

And that was just literally just point and click.

So it’s interesting to see what happens.

So I’ll be curious to see what happens as I go around London

that taking photos.

• The one thing that I’ve been playing with

and I’ve yet to export them onto a device

that is compatible is I recently installed the new beta

and installed the option to have the Apple Pro RAW image

from being able just to look at it on the phone

at the moment, the images do seem far more detailed.

pattern work shows up particularly or anything involving fabric.

Doing my typical household cat image and taking a picture of the pets.

And one thing that’s clearly recognizable, particularly in video is the sheer

level of detail that’s captured on fur,

which is very difficult to render anyway on a photograph from any DSLR.

but that in particular is much, much of an improvement.

And I jumped from a 10S to the 12 Pro Max.

• I think also you’ll find that if you zoom in

on the pictures, the noise is also much better controlled.

It’s a markedly less apparent from,

I’d say from my 10, which is what three generations old.

But that’s useful if you’re,

especially if you’re trying to crop or blow up

to a larger size.

And I think that’s to do with the sensor,

obviously it’s bigger inside and works that much better.

• And for those who are not sure what noise is

on the photograph, it’s those colored

sort of speckled pixels that you’ll get,

especially on low light photography,

if you’ve ever had the original iPhones

or if you had cheap Android phones,

you would notice that in low light,

you get more like a pixelated image

of multi-coloured speckles appearing across it. What I’m intrigued to test is the idea of doing

very short videos which you can now do on the new generation SE where you just swipe your finger

across the shutter. So if you swipe it to the left you get a series of very quick snapshots

and if you slide it to your right you get a very short video. So that might come in very useful

So if you just want to upload like 10 seconds, 20 seconds or something.

I think one of the problems about any of the cameras is they want to make them really easy to use.

So there are lots of things that are hidden that like you’ve just said.

So I’ve had a happy time watching YouTube videos.

Clearly I have to do something when I’m sitting around and they talk about things like that.

and the fact that you can hold it or you can switch it on so that the video keeps playing

and stuff like that. So it’s good.

I was told about this, but since I turned on the phone, the camera said, “By the way,

move it to the left and it said now move it to the right.” And it was taking me through

a tutorial, which was surprising. I haven’t seen Apple do that before.

That’s the Instagram generation. They’re trying to make all these things so easy and

simple that has quite an effect on 40 old fogies like ourselves who did it the hard way. So,

yes, very interesting. The other one I know this is a particular change that they’ve made in jumping

to the 12 is if anybody’s noticed the view outside the frame function. So it’s a little bit hidden,

it’s in the settings of the camera, but what that means is that you can physically see on the screen

through the black bars that are on the top of the iPhone camera app.

So when it comes to framing a picture, it’s much easier to line it up.

And that’s a function you can actually turn on and off now,

as well as lens correction, which if you’re a photographer out there, you will know what this

means. But for the novices, we will say that it actually recognizes the type of lens that the

image is being taken with and corrects the distortion and that is actually a function

you can turn on and off.

As I saw that in the features.

Yeah there are a lot of hidden little gems in there to look through.

I think we could do a podcast just on features on the camera on the phone itself.

Does any of you use a different app other than the camera app for iPhone to take your

photos?

I’ve messed about with some of them in the past,

and invariably end up just going back to the Apple Camera app.

It’s always on.

It takes you straight through what you want to do.

Over time, it’s got much better.

But yeah, I bought a couple of different ones when they came out to do various different things.

But like Apple has a habit of doing,

they tend to find other good technologies and other good apps,

and amalgamate them into its own operating systems.

We’ve seen a lot of cases of that.

And I said, I think the Apple app, camera app,

is pretty, you know, it does 80, 90% of what you want.

It’s only if you’re more specialized

that you might need to look at a different app.

But for me, no, I use the standard app on board.

• Snap, I use Camera Plus for a while,

But in the end, it got great reviews.

Lots of people loved it.

But because I was a lazy cow

and didn’t learn how to use it properly,

I just went back to the Apple app

because it was just really easy to use.

• Did the typical thing of,

“Oh, this app is popular to do this.

Let’s give it a go.”

And end up reverting back to the camera app.

But one app out there that’s really good is the Moment app.

So some of you might have heard of moment lenses

that are available in that Apple store.

So you don’t actually need the app to work

with the lenses at all or vice versa.

The nice thing about this particular app

is that if you take lots of different scenarios

with your photography,

you can actually set presets for different types of photos.

So if you’re doing something involving slow motion,

you can change the shutter speed and it will remember it.

And then you can flick back to portrait mode.

And some really clever ones that actually come with it

is there’s the cinematic video option,

which is worth having to play with,

raw burst mode and slow motion,

but you have entirely unlimited palette

to have a play and make some presets,

which is quite nice.

And one quirky thing about this is

if you’re a fan of Apple shortcuts,

it works brilliantly with those.

So you can literally open up the app

based on the preset that you’ve got there straight away.

• Does anyone use any software

to manage their photographs on the phone

or just the photographs on the phone?

So for example, I’m saying stuff like Google Photos

or any programs that adjust the photography

like Lightroom or programs like Instagram

which have to run filter packs.

• You see, I’m a control freak.

So I once, years ago, a colleague had a small camera nicked

and they lost all their photos.

So I use image capture, I take the photos off my phone

and back them up on hard drives.

They join all my other photos and then what I do have just you know, my dad used to carry pictures in the wallet

So I have some folders that I sync with my phone and so I have like edited highlights things that I like

That sit on my phone, but they’re on my laptop

So that’s that’s separate from the the photos library

Which obviously downloads all the pictures you take on your phone anyway, but if you’re not both you’re obviously not tied to it

he doesn’t but that’s my first backup on photos if I take them on the phone they go straight to

the photos library. So I don’t really use photos as a map. When I first got to Mac

I came from Windows, but I knew where my photos were on my hard drive. I file them in certain ways

and when I first opened photos and it imported a load of photos I was thinking

well where are they? Where are my photos gone? And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like

knowing where they were. I want to know where they are because I use them with

other software as well. So I’ve used Aperture obviously my favorite and still

my favourite and therefore I control where my photos are. I put them onto a hard drive

and I back them up to a second hard drive and then I use something called reference

files so even with aperture and actually I think you can do this with photos now. I don’t

import my photos into the app.

What I actually do is I say,

this is they call them reference files.

So you say, well, leave them where they are.

And so they know that that’s where the photos are.

So I’ll go and look for it there.

So when I’m using aperture, that’s what they do.

So I control where my photos are.

And I do the same in my phone photos.

Yeah, everything is all together.

do it by months and by activities.

Tina, do you ever use the privacy settings on the phone

to control which apps have access to different photos?

Yes, I do.

Interestingly, I’ve just read an article on WhatsApp

and they’re talking about the thing to do with photos.

So I’m gonna be looking at my WhatsApp settings

because they’re saying that’s one of the ways

that people deliver malicious code.

because if you have a photo and you’re setting as such that all of the photos from WhatsApp are downloaded

that’s a bad thing

because it’s like leaving your door open to your phone and people could do it

which is a shame because it’s really, I know it’s a bad thing

it’s a really convenient thing but anyway I will be changing that

I can already see people nodding their heads and don’t do it

it. So yeah, I normally choose which apps are allowed to have access to actually anything.

My information, my photos, my location, I try to be careful about that. Not that I think

the big brother’s watching me because I’m really not that interesting, but I like to

know who’s using what and if they don’t need to use it, they shouldn’t use it.

So what I tend to do is, regarding WhatsApp, is I use the privacy settings to stop WhatsApp

from controlling the camera, but I use WhatsApp to look at the photo library, so I can pick

stuff up from the photo library which I’ve taken from the camera and it can go into WhatsApp,

but WhatsApp can’t save to the photo library.

And if I want to take something from WhatsApp, I normally do a screenshot, so I normally

hold the power button and the home key, which is part of the reason I went for the SE again.

And then I take a screenshot because normally I’m sending it to someone else and they don’t

need to have the copy of it. More importantly, if you do a screenshot, you’re stripping out any

metadata. So the person you’re sending it to, if they send it onto someone else has no information

where it came from. As regards to my photography, I tend to come from OS9 days, so I’m used to

having the idea of having your photos before you had apps. So I save everything to files in the

finder. I have Dropbox copy things when I’m on Wi-Fi, so I have a copy sent to Dropbox,

which is very useful because I’m on multiple Macs.

I also use Google Photos because I also have an Android phone because I have to support both.

And it’s very useful because I can then jump between them.

And I find that I don’t store photos that often in the Photos app.

I tend to store them in a folder on my desktop or in the picture folder because that’s where I’ve

always stored them when I was on OS9 and when I went to Photoshop, when it was Photoshop 4,

you had to learn how to do it that way and I’ve never bothered to change because as you mentioned,

Tina, you always need to know where that photo is. So I do have photos, I do use photos, but I don’t

use it connected to iCloud. I like to have it know exactly where everything is. That’s the file,

that’s how I use it. So I prefer to use something like Google Drive at the file side of iCloud or

Dropbox. That is one of the problems of course with photos and videos getting larger and larger

and larger in size, file size. You can very quickly use up your hard drive space just on your phone or

laptop or whatever. So unless you do some good housekeeping, fairly regular on your photos,

you can swamp any type of hard drive you have. So you just need to bear that in mind when you’re,

I don’t know how many of you remember when you went out with a camera, with a film in it,

you might have a 36-roll film in it and you might have a couple of spare canisters in your pocket.

So you were going to, if you’re lucky, you might take 100 photographs, so you’d be careful.

Now you go out with a phone or your camera, your digital camera, you can take hundreds,

literally hundreds of photographs in a few minutes. So that’s a consideration as well that you need

to think about how you’re going to install your file. I think my current aperture file is now

800 megabytes in size. So that’s a huge file to carry around. I couldn’t carry it around on my

laptop, it has to be on an external hard drive. But then it means it’s easy then to back that up

as well. So like yourself Tina, I have my first my first portal called is obviously photos and

aperture for all my camera photographs. And then they’re backed up through CCC or through Google

Drive or other ways of storing all that information. So yeah, I know you like to take the Mickey

Craig called me the backup king but I can’t say enough honestly. There are two types of people

yeah those of us that have had some form of hard drive failure and those of that that haven’t.

Yeah those are yeah those who’ve had had backup failure and those are about to have it yes very

true Tina very true not that I wish on anybody but it’s it’s it’s only when it happens the first

time when you just like tell you I’m sure you’ve lost all those baby photographs of

someone’s important to you and all of a sudden they’ve gone you can’t get back it’s a

horrible horrible feeling so don’t put yourself in that position.

The interesting thing is about backing up especially for photographs is the sheer cost

of backing up photos. For me yes I have to keep lots of different versions of files because that

that is part of my job.

So I’m probably sitting on about 20,000 photos

just on one hard drive at the moment.

But I’ve been looking recently into different ways

of storing them on the cloud online.

I don’t know if you had any thoughts

on that particular subject.

So Dropbox versus Google Drive or even iCloud.

• Can I put in a shout out for Flickr?

Flickr Pro.

I’m trying to get back into that.

They’re a nice organization.

They’ve got financial difficulties,

so they’ve had several big appeals.

And I’ve found them very helpful.

So even if you don’t want to do the thing

where you follow people and people look at your pictures,

it’s another way of storing your files.

Certainly important ones anyway.

• I think it’s a question of use what you can,

you can. If you have a Microsoft 365 account, for example, you’ve got a terabyte of storage there.

You’ve got a terabyte with R-Cyde Drive or two terabytes if you pay the extra.

Then you’ve got Dropbox, you’ve got Google. There’s various different places where you’re given a

certain amount of free storage. Take advantage of it, make use of that with multiple buckups.

and this is where I think CCC, ClavinCrop with Clona is the king. It just does all of that

automatically. It will help you out tremendously. So, yeah, think about and again, I know we’ve

bang on about this, but again, different formats. It’s okay saying you’ve got everything up in the

cloud, but if we lose the internet, if something happens to the internet, you can’t get access

to the cloud, what do you do? So having external hard drives, I’ve got old CDs, I’ve got DVDs,

I’ve got mini disk you name it. I’ve got it stored somewhere on some kind of format my problem now, of course is I

Haven’t got the format drives. I don’t have good. I got I can see them now

I’ve got 20 jazz drives here with storage on it. I haven’t got a jazz drive

So finding that old technology now is becoming

critically difficult

So you’ve got me talking about backups again Craig so we wouldn’t gonna do this we’ll talk about photographs tonight

I think this is the other thing that’s going to be interesting with photography is that we are looking at universal formats and they’re changing.

changing and you need to be aware that it’s not as universal as you think so

I’ve got a little tough camera from Olympus and I’ve got really comfortable

with the fact that my Mac shows raw files it shows JPEGs it doesn’t really

tell the difference and in some systems that’s not the case well I’ve got this

this camera and for whatever reason Olympus or Apple who cares I love these

files and all I get is a hey it’s a file picture you know I can’t tell what’s

actually on the picture so if I want to use it or look at it on my Mac I have

to convert the files into a DNG file and therefore then I can deal with it and

so for a lot of people that I mean like we’ve all got new iPhones now and we

can is it pipe but that’s like a new format and that’s interesting because I

I sometimes use Photoshop elements I think it’s 2019 and interesting I opened a

file and it did open it fair do’s but it treated it like it was a negative and

then it went to the screen where I could look at it and do things to it so

although my old copy of aperture thank you retroactive it’s recognising the

that file. So it’s quite happy with my new files. Now I haven’t upgraded to Big Sur yet.

Yes, that’s always the cutting point. I had my 2010 17 inch laptop, which I absolutely

doored, did everything for me. And finally it gave up the ghost when we got to the El Capitan.

It just couldn’t run because it was only a dual core chip and the whole structure of

of Velcapitan was based upon multi-core and it just,

not, sorry, can’t do it.

So that was the time to upgrade the machine.

So yeah, it is a turning point when you get to that point

where something you’ve used for so long and trusted with

and know the ins and outs of and then say,

you know, one side, slip of the mouse button

and you click upgrade and all of a sudden,

you can have some fun for the next few days and weeks.

(upbeat music)

So we’re now coming into the part of the show where we try to help our listeners and our members out there as much as possible with their tech questions.

The first tech question we’ve had is, where is my JPEG and text files gone?

So in doing some more research on this particular one, I discovered that the gentleman has actually recently done an upgrade to his operating system.

And he is right, JPEGs and text files are no longer listed.

The reason being is they are no longer the default

in Big Sur’s operating system as file names.

Apple has moved over to its iPhone friendly format of Heath.

The high efficiency imaging format.

Apple have now said that the reason they have chose this

is it provides a better compression over video

and audio files, and the files are much smaller

when they’re stored.

So that might be the reason why you can’t find them.

However, the clever little thing is that there is now

an option in any of the text or JPEG files

that you may open that you can now right click on Big Sur

and there is an option that’s called Quick Action,

which lets you convert them back

to their original file format.

I don’t know if anybody else has anything

wish to add to that particular subject. I haven’t actually come across that myself yet, but I’ll

obviously have a look through the file structure on my MacBook Pro and see if I’ve come across

any instances of that, but no, I can’t say I’ve seen that yet. Carrying on the theme of photography,

I’ve recently updated to Big Sur and some of my albums now show the wrong pictures when I click

on them or that I can’t open my photos or iPhoto library. Does anybody have any suggestions

for this one? So it sounds like the photos, it could be that there could be a corrupt

library which needs to be repaired and I haven’t tried it on Big Sur yet but on all the other

previous ones you could hold down the alt key or the option key when you’re opening up photos

and that allowed you the option to repair the library,

which often fixes a lot of problems on that one.

I know that they switched over,

was it in Catalina, the iTunes,

so that the image files are in slightly different location.

So it might be that there’s a file linkage problem there,

but was it used to be able to hold down the shift key

on iTunes and that used to open it up

with nothing selected to try and get it around that problem.

So that’s, or is always worth a trick.

The other way to test it is to restart your Mac,

hold down the shift key so it starts in safe mode,

log into iTunes and see if you get the same fault.

If you don’t get the same fault,

you know it’s something which is competing

with the Apple file system, maybe causing problems.

• The interesting one that I came across with this

is that I had an old backup of very old OS

and tried to open the iFotos library

and it said that it was updating or rebuilding the library,

and then it fouls,

which seems to be quite common

in doing some more reading behind this.

So I just wanted to give some advice

on how you can actually find the photos,

because from an obvious perspective,

it looks like you’ve got one container

that you can’t open and all your files are gone,

but it’s always best to right-click

and display contents of folder,

and you can find the original files.

I don’t know if Alistair wants to throw any more

into that piece of advice.

• Yeah, so this one we come across a lot.

I’ve had this for the last 10 years.

When hard drives are failing, normally dying,

you often come across corrupted libraries,

especially ifoto libraries.

And all the photos are stored in a series of folders.

So you have the main folder called masters,

which is the original photography.

then there’s a series of folders which are named by the dates by goes year, month, day

of when the photos were taken and then they’re arranged by the time they were taken.

And if you ever have a corrupted folder, what you do is you right click on either iPhoto or Photos

and one of the lists says Show Packet Contents and then inside that it will show you a series of

blue folders and the one you’re looking for is masters and if you drag that

masters onto either an external drive if you’re transferring it to a new machine

or drag it onto the desktop and then drag that back onto photos what you’ll find is it will

rebuild the library but it won’t give you any of the album lists because the album lists are

contained within a separate folder inside that folder structure but if all you’re looking for

is just the photographs. This is a very helpful way to bring back the photography, but you lose

some of your albums as a result. Yeah, no, I completely agree. That’s a good way of actually

doing some backups on the originals. If you’ve got originals and masters, you can do that as a

form of backup, especially Craig, you mentioned there because you do commercial work, or if

you’re doing a photo shoot for someone or a wedding or something that you can’t repeat,

then being able to store those originals going in, taking those originals out,

putting them onto an external hard drive or a memory drive or something like that

is a good way of making sure you have your originals to hand whenever you need them.

Because the other thing that that then leads into is you need some form of photo filing system.

If you’re going to have all these multiple pictures, photographs, backups scattered all over the place,

you need to have some kind of reference file to say, well, where is the picture of little

Johnny sitting on the toilet? Where’s it gone? You know, I think Tina, you’ve done some work on that,

haven’t you? I store my files in a very particular way. So I do it by year,

and by month, and then by event. So if I know roughly when I took the photo,

then I’ve got a good chance of finding it. I don’t rename files except in very particular reasons

and I don’t use tagging and actually I think that’s an area that I need to develop now with

tagging because then it would help me find certain types of files quicker because sometimes you

call a folder something thinking it’s going to be something really you know memorable and then

two months later you’ve got no idea where you put it. So mine is all based on when I took it

and what camera I took it on. I must admit I use Aperture for all of that. I find it, I said I’m

banging the drum here, I never understood why they got rid of Aperture. For me it serves so many

purposes and one of them first and foremost was file formatting and saving. So I can, I use tags

a lot to you know something you should look at. And one of the great things in Aputure

is you’re able to batch tag. Now I know there are some software out there you can get to

do this but you could do it in-house in Aputure that I could take, look through pictures, I

could tag all of my son, all of my daughter, all of events, all my working jobs, whatever.

And by putting key tags in and using the red-blue-green buttons by using the five-star you could

so precisely tag and set what you wanted to. And it then meant you have multiple ways of

finding it. So if it was in a wedding or an event or a person, or you thought it was a

particularly good photograph you took, you’d have a bit like the Apple way of having three

different things doing the same three different ways doing the same thing. You could search

and find photographs going back. I’m going back 20 years, which I can find fairly quickly

through the tagging system.

And that’s why I was so low to give up Aputure.

I find that works in Lightroom as well.

Couple of third party apps I found out there,

again, don’t seem to do it as well as I found with Aputure.

So as you said, Tina, thank God for retrospect

who have kept that working.

• Well, now you’ve told me that they’ve done it

for big sir or consider upgrading.

• But don’t do it on your primary machine.

If you’ve got a secondary machine,

you can work from or Alistair’s method

of putting a threatened system on an external hard driver and work from that before you actually

convert your own. Well, I’m going to throw a spanner in the works in the, I used to be

an Apple fanboy of Aperture software and yes, I did love it, but it just became too clunky on some of

the newer machines that I made the jump and I moved to the Adobe setup. For my job, I used

Lightroom and Photoshop quite heavily.

But the interesting thing is, is that I don’t actually store any of my images within Lightroom.

Better to have them on an external drive by far, as Tina suggested.

And Martin will love this for his backups.

Yes, I do keep three backups, as well as one in the cloud that’s costing me a small fortune at the moment.

But it’s just an alternative way of doing it.

Does Alistair have any popular apps that he likes to use or backup methods for his photos?

So my photos, as I said, I already am sort of slightly old fashioned in a sense.

So what I tend to do is I have my photos traditionally in the picture folder named by events or the type of events.

So like maybe gardening or a place I’ve been to,

like a vacation or the type of photography I’m taking,

like architecture.

And then what I’ve done is I’ve color called,

you know, you can use the color dots.

So I put the color dots next to photographs.

And what I do is I just put color dots next to the photos,

which are ones I want to remember.

And then what I will do is I will put some of them,

maybe in photos or I’ll use them in Photoshop or one of the programs I love to use, which

is Luminaire or Aurora, which is the other one, which are both excellent.

And then I will often put, say a copy maybe in Dropbox if I have to send it to someone,

because often I’m having to send screenshots to people.

And what I’ve discovered is the simpler the system, the easier it is to send the files

to someone. Email is great for sending words, but if you want to send photographs to someone,

it has to be a simple system. So we transfer comes in very useful for some people.

Others, I send the photos via Google Photos, especially if I was in another country. So when

I was traveling and there was a 12 hour time difference, I would upload a copy of the photos

to Google Photos, and then the people I was sending them to could see the photos in their time zone.

without any problems and I wasn’t losing the photos of my phone. Also it was a

backup system because it was decentralized, it was no longer with me, it was in

another country. So I find that quite useful. What I have found is that you’ve

got to make sure that you look at your photos on a regular basis to check that

they’re still working and the names are still relevant. That’s the one thing I

will say. Backup is all very well and good but if you don’t bother to check up

your backup for five years, you think, “What the hell was this called?” Or, “Why does this not work?”

Because one thing that people forget is if you put a hard drive in, even external hard drive in

the cupboard and don’t use it for five years, it may seize up. And so you need to sort of check

your drives maybe once a year just to check everything is working and you know where it all

works and the cables are there. I still remember the days when people would find the cable,

which was the data cable to connect to the computer, but would lose the power cable.

And the only way to get to the drive was to break into the plastic

with a hacksaw and take the drive out, put it into an enclosure, and then copy the files onto

the computer and put it onto a newer enclosure. So if you’ve got the old-fashioned drives,

always remember where you put the power supply.

[Music]

So one major point of this entire show is I’m sure that Tina can now offer her advice on how

she manages her photos and in particular how the documents are managed.

Because I’m sad and I tend to go for brands that I know and like. In the past I’ve had a situation

I’ve had three different Canon cameras and Canon actually and iPhone all use IMG as their

name of their folder and then they’re numbered. So I’ve had a situation where I’ve had files

with the same name but because they’re from different cameras, they’re actually different

pictures and then when you try and store them together you get the thing of do you want

to keep both files, do you want to overwrite and all the rest of it and actually they’re

not the same file even though because they have the same name and they’re the same format,

usually raw, the laptop thinks they are. So one of the apps that I use is something called

NameMangler. NameMangler 3 is the one that you can use the current system and it means

that you can rename files. It’s a one-off payment of a reasonable amount, I was happy

with that. And you choose, so you give it a string, so normally I have IMG and then

for instance I might rename all of my phone photos IMG iPhone and it keeps

the numbering. You can do more than that with it but that’s what I do and then I

I just rename any files to do with my G5

and all the rest of it.

And I find it really useful because I might have

one event where I’ve used different things

and they’ve got the same number.

And I store them in it.

I store by event, by date and event.

So I might have two different cameras

with the same file names in one folder.

So I always rename using name and I find it really useful.

• Yeah, I totally agree.

There’s nothing worse than I’ve done it myself.

I’ve loaded uploaded films and not watched what I was doing

and just said, yes, replace.

And all of a sudden I’ve lost all the previous photographs

I’ve taken.

Luckily I have a backup so I could call them back,

but it’s not something you want to be doing.

So yeah, I’ll have a look at that.

That sounds quite good.

• Does the program let you add tags and things

that are available in other pieces of software?

• To be honest, I haven’t really explored it very much.

It does what I want to do,

which is it just renames the file.

It doesn’t affect anything else.

Now clearly you can look in the metadata

and I can tell you which from that,

but I also find it useful that I know which one it’s from.

So I just use it for renaming.

I think it was about 15 quid, so it’s not a big deal.

It’s a, for me, it’s a one-trick pony

that renames my files.

I think it can do more.

• Well, that’s all we have time for this week.

Let’s say thank you to the panel.

So first up, we’ll say thank you very much to Martin.

I know he’s a very busy man.

• Thank you very much, Craig.

I’ve enjoyed it as ever.

See you on the next one.

• And Alistair, thank you very much yet again

for all your technical advice.

• Well, thanks everyone.

It’s always great meeting up and talking about this.

• And thank you to Tina.

I’m now gonna go away

and start renaming every possible file I can on my computer.

Thanks to that piece of advice.

• Good luck.

It was great to talk to them.

I’m a little bit concerned that Alastair may not file his pictures by month and by event.

That’s going to make me worried for ages, not that I’m looking triumphant.

Brilliant. Until next time, thank you.

Coming up next week, we have our season of holiday specials, where we’ll be talking to

iPhone accessory CEO, discussing all things Apple with fellow Mac user group Chairman Graham

from the XMAP group over in the Exeter area.

Join us next Monday for much, much more

of The Brew and Bite Show.

For now, thank you and goodbye.

[MUSIC]