Sunday, May 24, 2015

Mac Photos Flickr upload problem


Recently I upgraded my iPhotos to Photos. As most humans, we tend to be resistant to change. I was quite hesitant about it, but it was a matter of time before iPhotos get phased out and it's about time iPhotos got some upgrade.

I feel more comfortable with the side bar (I also show the side bar for iTunes), but I'm not organising them into albums anymore since they don't have the option for me to sort them. So I'll just stick to the  Moments/Location/Year views.

I also realised the thumbnails (when zoomed out) of my photos look corrupted and they are not reflecting the correct photos. I haven't managed to solve that yet.

But the problem I want to talk about in this post is about uploading to Flickr. I realised that when I right click on the photos to upload them, sometimes they would show the Flickr option and sometimes it wouldn't. After lots of trial and errors, here are what I found out.

Scenarios when the Flickr option wouldn't show:

1. 100 or more photos are selected


100 photos selected

When selecting 99, it has the Flickr option

2. Videos are selected



I also realised that when trying to upload more than 50 photos at 1 go, it causes the upload to hang and no photos get uploaded at all. The sweet spot is any number below 50.

Conclusion

Select less than 50 photos with no videos, and your upload to Flickr should work fine. Hopefully. ;)

Here's my Photos version and I'm running on OS X Yosemite.


Friday, May 22, 2015

Speed up Mouse Tracking on Mac OS X

One of my gripes when using a mac was that I could never get my mouse to track fast enough. Even the highest option available in the System Preferences wasn't fast enough for me. Especially when you're using an external monitor, and if it's quite large, your mouse pad would not be big enough for your mouse to roam in order to get from one corner of your screen to the other.  Generally, I just want to keep my hand movement to minimal. ;) Here is a solution that worked for me.

1. Open a Terminal Window. 


You can Spotlight for "terminal"

2. Check your mouse speed.


Enter the following command to see what your current setting is:

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

This will return a numeric value, the speed of your mouse.

3. Set your mouse speed


To speed up (or slow down) your mouse tracking, you can simply change this number accordingly by typing the following command, replacing the “your_mouse_speed” with a new number such as 5.0. Notice that read has been changed to write:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling your_mouse_speed

The maximum mouse speed on mac desktops is 3.0 (when maxed out in system preferences). I use 5.0 and it works well for me.

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling  5.0

You may need to restart your mac to see the changes take effect.

Hope that helps.