Mac hints and tips
Shrink photos for emailing(10.4/5)
Digital cameras are getting increasingly better and the photos from the latest models are fantastic - super high resolution and pin-sharp images we only dreamed of a few years ago.
Have you ever tried emailing your photos to friends and relatives though? Even with JPEG compression to squeeze the file size, modern digital photos can be 2Mb or more. Photos stored as RAW images can be 10Mb or more.
If you email all your holiday snaps to your friends and relatives you may well get an angry response because it's not much fun seeing multimegabyte email messages clogging up your inbox. What can you do?
Of course, the solution is to resize your photos before you send them. You could do this in a photo editing program or photo manager, but there is a simpler method.
Just create a new email message in Mail and then drag a photo from a Finder window and drop it on the message. It will automatically be inserted and in the bottom right-hand corner of the window you'll see a pop-up Image Size menu.
Click it and you can choose from Small, Medium or Large options. Medium is, er, a happy medium and Goldilocks qwould love it - it's not too big and it's not too small, it's just right.
Open with another application (10.4/5)
When a file is double clicked OS X will open it using the application that is associated with it. Most of the time this is exactly what you want and you can edit, view or play the file as appripriate. Sometimes though, you want to open a file in a particular application and not the default one that is associated with it. For example, if you have TextEdit, NeoOffice and Pages on your Mac, which one will OS X use to open an RFT document when you double click it?
How can you make sure that a file opens in the right application when there are several that can do the job? It's easy, instead of double clicking a file and accepting the default, hold down the Ctrl key and click once on the file. A menu is displayed and then you can select Open With and choose one of the applications that are listed.
OS X is pretty good at dertermining which applications can open which file types, but if for some reason you can't see the application you want on the menu, click the Other option at the bottom and you can choose the application from the hard disk drive.
