THE TECH PAGE

Manage your smartphone images

EVER TALK TO someone who lost their phone and didn’t have it backed up? The photos are the only data they actually care about. Years of mindless shooting and uploading had made my own photo library an unmanageable mess – 22 000 images spread across multiple devices. So when Apple and Adobe recently updated their photo apps, I had an excuse to pare down to the ones I want forever, the stuff that reminds me why photographs matter. If you can relate, here’s how to do it.

1 GET THEM IN ONE PLACE

I had to assemble everything from a couple of dusty hard drives, an old laptop, and my Google and Amazon accounts into one place. I downloaded and transferred the photos into a folder on my Macbook, then dumped them into one unifying app. I chose Apple’s Photos, which is newly fantastic. It saves everything to icloud at full resolution, including RAW photos I take on my Olympus PENF. It’s easy to correct time stamps. And, as with almost every Apple product I’ve owned, it just works. I can open Photos on my iphone X, delete a few from last weekend, and know that it will free up space on my icloud. Speaking of which, paying R45 per month for a bigger icloud plan (200 GB) worth it.

2 START DELETING

The big photo mountain was ugly. Everything out of order, duplicates all over the place. I asked Apple, Adobe and Google whether their software could delete duplicates. “We’ve had a lot of requests for that,” they all said. But none has acted on it. That led me to Photosweeper, a R150 app that scans your library and shows a sideby-side comparison of what it thinks are dupes (Fig. 1), then you trash what you don’t want. Unlike similar apps, Photosweeper can adjust. For example, you can ask it to find photos burstshot within two seconds of each other, and save only the one you like. (For Windows, Duplicate Photo Cleaner comes closest to Photosweeper.) I went from 22 000 to about 14 000. Progress.

3 DELETE SOME MORE

Google, Apple and Adobe all have their own versions of computer vision: software that analyses your images so when you type in “beach,” or “dog,” it finds all instances of that object. The technology is fallible but useful for this project. I searched for “receipt” and found dozens of restaurant checks from old expense reports (Fig. 2). Photos also has a Screen Shots section, where I’d saved images of digital plane tickets and text conversations that weren’t as funny as I remembered. Same for the Videos tab, which contained movies of the inside of my pocket. Delete.

4 ACTUALLY ENJOY THEM

I was down to 12 300, about 46 GB, just over half of what I started with. The change was unreasonably satisfying and not just because I could downgrade my icloud plan from R45 to R15 (50 GB) a month. With a clean work space, I’ve been teaching myself to edit. I’m favouriting the ones to send to Orms (less than R300 for a framed A5). I got back on Instagram. Having fewer files is liberating because, unless tech companies find a profitable way to lighten your digital load, you’ll have to take care of it yourself. Photos are the best place to start.

Smart speakers are a dime-a-dozen these days in First World markets. Every name in tech has released its own intelligent speaker with a built-in voice assistant.

Apple is the latest company to join the fray and has finally unveiled its Homepod speaker. Oddly, this is most likely the only one in its product category that will make it to our shores. We’re okay with that because unlike other smart speakers, Homepod prioritises sound quality over artificial intelligence.

You’ll still be able to use Homepod to get Siri to perform certain functions like set a timer (only one at a time) and play music from itunes or Apple Music but it’s somewhat limited when compared to Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home.

Inside is an eight speaker array powered by Apple’s A8 chip. Basically it’s an iphone 6s with really good speakers instead of a screen. Seven tweeters fire down and out from the bottom and a single 4” woofer fires up from the top.

There are also seven microphones. Six are used for “Hey Siri” detection – which works ridiculously well – while the seventh is used to determine the location of the woofer relative to the room so that Homepod can measure the bass.

Homepod uses all of this technology to measure and analyse the room when you first set up the speaker so that it can accurately adjust the sound quality to the room. If you’re an Apple fan who only gets their music from itunes or Apple Music and you prioritise audio quality over AI, then this is definitely the speaker for you.

Fig. 1