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Amazing Darkroom photo app now does video

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Darkroom, the amazing iOS photo-editing app, now edits video
Darkroom, the amazing iOS photo-editing app, now edits video
Photo: Darkroom

Darkroom, one of the best photo library and editing apps on iOS, is now also one of the best video library and editing apps on iOS. In today’s update, Darkroom adds support for editing your videos. Not cutting and chopping them up, like iMove, but changing how they look, as if you were applying filters and edits to a still photograph. And the along thing is, it’s instant, just as fast as editing a still image.

iOS 13.4 beta 2 brings more tweaks to Mail toolbar

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iCloud folder sharing is in iPadOS 13.4 and iOS 13.4
iCloud folder sharing finally arrives in iPadOS 13.4, and iOS 13.4 too.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

Apple seeded the second beta build of iOS 13.4 and iPadOS 13.4 to developers this morning bringing a bunch of bug fixes and some small new features to the iPhone and iPad.

Included among the changes are some more changes to the controversial toolbar in the Mail app. Apple also added some under-the-hood improvements and some changes to how location authorization works in apps.

Add rad text captions to your Instagram photos without an app

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Captions
I couldn’t find any good cat pictures in my photo library.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Do you want to overlay captions onto your Instagram photos? Of course you do. How else can express your inner poet, while simultaneously re-creating the worst of history’s inspirational posters? Where would humanity be without the “Hang in there, baby” cat poster? Doomed, that’s where.

Today we’re going to see how to add captions to any photo, without using an app. I won’t even force you to use a Siri Shortcut (although that’s a good option). And, of course, you don’t ever have to post the result to Instagram.

Take control of your family photos this Christmas

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headless Santa holiday photos
Ho ho ho!
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

This weekend, you’re “enjoying” some extended time with your family. After you’ve fixed their devices, and taught them that the battery of their iPhone lasts way longer if they don’t leave the damn screen on the whole time, you might decide to swap some photos. You may grab the your old childhood snaps off your mother’s iPad, or photos of the family recipe book off your father’s iPhone. There are a few ways to do this — slow, fast and faster, wired or wireless. Let’s see how to transfer photos between iPhones and iPads, and how to share the best holiday photos with everyone.

Instagram’s AI will now warn you before posting offensive captions

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Instagram lawsuit
Instagram is trying to make caption less toxic.
Photo: Pixabay

In an effort to combat online bullying, Instagram is rolling out a new feature today that warns users when their captions might be considered offensive.

The new feature gives users the chance to pause and reconsider their words before posting, but it doesn’t completely prevent people from posting inappropriate captions.

This is what you can expect to see:

How to combine Live Photos into a shareable video

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live photo videos
Turn your Live Photos into videos.
Photo: Muhammad Haikal Sjukri/Unsplash

In iOS 13 and iPadOS, you can easily collect a bunch of Live Photos, and combine them into a single video. It’s great for sharing, or just making a cool remix of your clips. And this isn’t another one of those (awesome) posts where we use Shortcuts to do the dirty work. Making Live Photos videos is a new feature built into the Photos app.

Here’s how to use it.

How to use iPadOS’ new full-page PDF capture tool

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Now you can capture an entire web page as a single, long, PDF.
Now you can capture an entire web page as a single, long, PDF.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iPadOS 13 soups up its screenshot tool with the ability to capture an entire webpage as a PDF. That means it doesn’t just grab what you can see on the screen right now. If you’re viewing a webpage that’s really, really long, it will capture the whole thing, and turn it into a very tall PDF.

You can also mark up the resulting PDF before you save it to the Files app. This is a fantastic way to save a webpage, especially when you combine it with Reader View to remove the ads, sidebars and other junk first.

Let’s see how to use it.

Check out the next-level photo editing tools in iOS 13

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In iOS 13, Photos is now an image-editing powerhouse
In iOS 13, Photos is now an image-editing powerhouse
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The Photos app in iOS 13 is now good enough that you may never need another app to edit your photos, for regular edits at least. Somehow Apple made the app even easier to use, and added some new features, while making existing features far easier to find.

For instance, Portrait Mode now gets its own tab; the automatic magic wand tool can now be fine-tuned (as can the built-in filters); and the crop tool now fixes perspective, and mirror-flips your photos.

How to save gigabytes of data while traveling

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Nothing says
Nothing says "freedom" and "pioneer spirit" like a creepy abandoned canoe.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Summer! That time of year where you stay in somebody else’s home via Airbnb, crank up their air conditioning and wear a sweater in the house, even though it’s 90 degrees outside. Aka the season where you leave the limitless comfort of your home Wi-Fi, to venture out into the world using just a restricted cellular plan.

Summer revives that old pioneering spirit of hardship, the bare essentials of living, and of making do with whatever you have. And just like the original English and Spanish invaders of the modern-day United States, you’ll have to do without the comforts of on-demand GPS and automatic app updates.

Today we’ll see how you can stretch your meager data allowance while traveling.

Is viral FaceApp stealing your photos? Not all of them

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FaceApp
FaceApp uses AI to deliver impressive photo effects.
Photo: FaceApp

Impressive artificial intelligence that delivers some of the most convincing facial effects has made FaceApp incredibly popular in recent weeks. But there’s some concern over what happens to your photos when you use it.

The good news is FaceApp won’t steal your entire photo library. However, some of your images will end up on its servers.

How to stop your Photos library from taking over your Mac

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Film Contact sheet
Don't let your photos take over your whole SSD.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The Photos app on the Mac has two options for storing your photos. You can tell it to keep the full-size originals of everything, or you can have it self-manage, keeping your master library in iCloud and storing a mixture of full-resolution and low-res versions locally to save space.

The trouble is, even when you choose the “Optimize Mac Storage” option, the Photos app’s storage can metastasize and take over your whole drive. Today we’ll see how to cap this storage, giving Photos a hard limit on how much space it can use. For instance, if you have a MacBook with a 128GB SSD, you could choose to only use 30GB for Photos — and it will never, ever use more.

Third betas for iOS 13 and iPadOS arrive for devs

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ios13
Users can't wait to get their hands on iOS 13.
Photo: Apple

Apple seeded the third beta build of iOS 13 and iPadOS to developers this morning, bringing a host of new tweaks and bug fixes to test devices just before the 4th of July break.

iOS 13 beta 3 arrives just over two weeks after Apple dropped the last developer beta. The first iOS 13 public beta came out a week ago. Apple also released the third betas of tvOS 13, watchOS 6 and macOS Catalina today.

Here’s how multi-select works in iPadOS 13

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Strawberries multi-select
Yum! I'll take a 'multiple selection' of these.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

There are plenty of little annoyances that stop the iPad from being as easy to use as the Mac, especially when it comes to working with multiple items. On the Mac you can Select All with the keyboard, and you can easily add and remove items from a selection. You can click an empty space in a Finder window and start dragging a selection. And more.

The iPad sort of incorporates some of these features in some places. But in iPadOS, multi-select has been somewhat consolidated. And it is now arguably as good as the Mac, at least in the places where you can use it.

How to stop friends from swiping through all your photos

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Old cameras and projectors
Photos were much simpler in the old days.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

I hate my friends. I want to show them a photo, or that screenshot I took of those cute otters, and all they can do is take one look, and then swipe off into the rest of my photos. And trust me, you don’t want to know what I have lurking back there. And I also hate myself, because I do the exact same thing without thinking. It’s human nature.

Some apps let you load up a few photos to show to other people, so they can’t pull back the virtual shower curtain and peek at your private photos. But these require that you do extra work to prepare them.

Happily, iOS offers a way to lock down a single image. That way, when you hand your iPhone or iPad over to a friend, or anyone else, they can’t swipe to other photos. In fact, they can’t do anything at all, because you’ve locked the whole touchscreen. Best of all, you can toggle this on and off in a second.

What’s new in iOS 13 beta 2

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iOS 13 has almost too many features to cover -- but that won't stop us trying.
iOS 13 has almost too many features to cover -- but that won't stop us trying.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The second iOS 13 and iPadOS betas bring both good news and bad. Unless you’re a total “thrill-seeker,” it’s still not a good idea to install these betas on your main iOS device. In fact, there will be far more spills than thrills: The code remains raw and buggy as hell.

I have iPadOS running on an old iPad. While this latest version seems much less ragged around the edges, many apps still crash. And I still can’t make the Slide Over apps hide themselves at the side of the screen. Nor do all my favorites appear in the Files app.

The good news is that, despite this, the latest betas offer several new features — and lots of stuff has been fixed. Let’s take a look at the highlights of what’s new in iOS 13 beta 2.

How to resize a JPG on your iPhone

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If only you could resize and share all pictures.
If only you could resize and share all pictures.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Ever wanted to resize a photo before sending it, or posting it to the web? The quickest and easiest way to do this is with a shortcut. And it’s even quicker and easier because I’ve already written it for you. All you have to do is share the photo from inside the Photos app, pick this shortcut, and you’re pretty much done. Check it out.

Camera comparison proves iPhone is still one of the best

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camera sales
iPhone photography is still incredibly good.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

Android enthusiasts are keen to highlight how the iPhone has dropped in the smartphone camera ranks in recent years. But a new camera comparison reveals that may not be the case.

Although there are some better options out there for low-light photography, Apple’s smartphone is still up there with the best when it comes to daytime shooting.

How to tell Photos it recognized the wrong person

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Photos app is usually pretty good at recognizing people.
Photos app is usually pretty good at recognizing people.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The Photos app’s Faces feature is fantastic. It does a pretty good job of gathering all the pictures of a person together, for both browsing and search. And it’s really easy to add new faces to the list. But what about managing those faces? What if the Photos app’s AI added some photos of a stranger into the photos of your husband?

It’s easy to tell your iPhone or iPad that a photo does not contain the person it thinks it does. Unfortunately, it’s a real pain to find the setting you need to tweak.