Tutorials

How to move Photos library to an external drive

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 1, 2018

In addition to moving your multi-gigabyte iTunes library to an external drive, a significant amount of Mac storage space can be freed up by moving your photo libraries onto a separate drive.

If you take a lot of pictures with a DSLR camera or your iOS devices and import them in Photos, you'll fairly quickly run out of free space on most Macs.

This tutorial will guide you through the process of moving an entire library of photos to an external drive, preferably to a much larger external hard drive, in a way that won't disrupt your photography workflow.

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Link your Spotify account with Shazam to enable full song previews & more

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated May 29, 2019

The Shazam app for iOS comes with the ability to link your Spotify account so you can stream the music you tag via Spotify directly from the Shazam app itself. A recent update to the app included a complete rewrite for this feature, so it's now more stable than ever before.

All you have to do is connect your Spotify account to the Shazam app, and the app will take care of the rest for you, allowing you to listen to full tracks in Shazam instead of just 30-second song previews.

In this tutorial, we'll be showing you how to link your Spotify account to the Shazam app in iOS.

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How to view your download history in the Mac App Store

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated April 29, 2019

Heavy Mac App Store users will download, install, and delete apps from their Mac all the time. It may be because you're interested in experimenting with new utility releases, downloading games to get a thrill, or checking out the productivity apps that developers claim to be the "best" out there.

Through all this downloading, installing, and deleting, you may want to check out one of the apps you remember using from a long time ago to see if it got any cool new updates, and sometimes you don't particularly remember what the name of said app might be.

Fortunately, the Mac App Store comes with a way to see your purchase history, allowing you to see all of the apps you've ever downloaded from the Mac App Store whether they were free or paid ones. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to see your Mac App Store's download history.

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How to stop ‘Up Next’ videos from autoplaying on YouTube

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated July 26, 2023

One of my pet peeves with YouTube is how after completing a video, the service shoves a new video down your throat with a feature called "Up Next," which gives you a 15-second time frame to click the "X" button at the top right of the video before the next video starts to play.

Sounds familiar? If you feel the same way, then you've stumbled upon the right tutorial, because we're going to be showing you how you can disable this feature right from the YouTube website without installing any plug-ins, hacks, or other crazy stuff.

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With this time-saving shortcut, you can quickly set some Mac display options

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 24, 2019

In addition to adjusting the screen resolution and choosing between the available display modes on your Mac, the macOS System Preferences application gives you additional display options to play with.

If you use display zoom, a great feature for people with less than perfect eyesight who find themselves squinting at the screen all the time, or you want to quickly access common features related to making items on the screen easier to see and the display easier to read, use the following time-saving shortcut to quickly adjust these options.

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How to move your iTunes library to an external drive

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated August 17, 2018

You'd be amazed how much of your Mac's storage is wasted on the iTunes library. All those apps and media you have purchased and downloaded over the years pile and clog up your Mac's precious storage.

But with one-terabyte external hard drives retailing for less than $60 on Amazon, there are no excuses not to spring for external storage to move that humongous iTunes library of yours on.

This post takes you step-by-step through the process of consolidating your iTunes library and moving it to an external drive in a way that will preserve your playlists, ratings and other interactions, so you won't miss a beat.

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How to use bookmark folders in Safari

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 25, 2019

In Safari, you can save websites you visit frequently so you can quickly revisit them later without having to remember their URLs. Saved webpages are accessible in Safari's Bookmarks menu on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or Mac.

If you save a lot of bookmarks, they will clutter the Bookmarks menu over time so locating that favorite website of yours will begin to feel like finding a needle in the haystack. You can avoid this by creating themed folders for organizing your bookmarks.

This tutorial provides step by step instructions for creating new Safari bookmark folders for iOS and macOS. You will also learn how to rename, reposition and delete these folders and file websites into them, all of which will help you organize your favorite websites to your liking.

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How to reset NVRAM on your Mac

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated July 23, 2018

Macs are nice computers, but they're not without their issues that can spur up at random times. Fortunately, troubleshooting problems on a Mac isn't incredibly difficult and there are tons of simple steps you can take as a Mac user before calling AppleCare for support.

One of the easiest troubleshooting steps is resetting your Mac's NVRAM, a step which can solve an array of problems. In this tutorial, we'll explain what the NVRAM is responsible for and how to reset it to fix common problems.

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How to measure Mac frame rates and enable HiDPI display modes on older models with Quartz Debug

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated May 2, 2019

Have you ever wanted to benchmark the graphics performance of your favorite Mac apps and games, or measure the refresh rates of macOS's user interface?

If so, you'll be delighted to learn that Apple provides a free application, called Quartz Debug, which has a built-in live frame rate monitoring tool that can measure the refresh rate of the graphics subsystem in frames per second (FPS).

Here's how you can download Quartz Debug to your Mac and use it to display the number of screen updates per second, see the FPS and CPU gauges changing as you perform different actions on your Mac, enable HiDPI display modes on non-Retina Macs and adjust other settings related to the computer's GPU.

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How to disable transparency effects on your Mac

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 17, 2019

The release of OS X Yosemite in 2014 gave the Mac's user interface a fresh coat of paint in part through adopting much of the transparency effects that Apple added to iOS 7 in prior year.

Transparency is used throughout macOS and can be observed on the desktop and seen in drop-down menus, title bars, sidebars and toolbars.

This post will teach you how to disable transparency for all user interface elements that have a translucent appearance on your Mac.

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How to choose which contacts appear in the Phone app 3D Touch shortcut menu

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated January 29, 2018

Are the contacts in the 3D Touch shortcut menu of the Phone app confusing you? Upon pressing Phone's icon lightly, a menu pops up with four seemingly random contacts, making it easy to call them quickly from the Home screen. Believe it or not, there's actually some logic behind listing these quick contacts. Even better, you can change their order as well as set other people to be listed in Phone's shortcut menu.

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