Killer Tips: More Tiger And Panther Tips And Tricks

We’ve had a ‘Tips & Tricks’ regular category for awhile. It’s loaded with tips and tricks. Duh.

Every couple of days I’ll dig up a few more to make your Mac life more productive, more fun, more Mac-like, less like Windows.

I was really pleased with a number of features in Tiger that allow for a more seamless integration between applications. I’m not talking just iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, either. We’re beginning to see applications ‘talk’ with each other.

Mail, for example, lets you take a photograph you received from a friend and save it direct to iPhoto. It’s one of those ‘simple’ things that’s also easy to overlook.

You’ve received a photo as an attachment in Mail. Just above the top of the photo, where it says ‘Attachment’ are two buttons; Save and Slideshow. Let’s skip Slideshow for the moment and go straight to Save.

If you just click the Save button, you’ll get the standard dialog box (the dialog is one way) which lets you determine where on your Mac you want to save the photo. iPhoto is not a choice.

So, instead of just clicking the Save button, click and hold. You can tell there’s extra options to Save because of the little down arrow next to the word Save (within the button).

Click and hold. Now you get more options. Save All is an option which assumes you have multiple photo attachments. The option we want is ‘Save to iPhoto.’

When you select ‘Save to iPhoto’ in Mail, your Mac launches iPhoto, and saves the photo as a new photo roll. That’s all you have to do. Cool feature, huh?

See, that’s a Killer Tip.

Wait. There’s more. That very same tip shows up in Safari, too.

Let’s say you’re browsing around the supermodel web sites, and come upon a site loaded with photos of model Laetitia Casta. Whoa!

To add photos of lovely Laetitia to your iPhoto collection of supermodels used to require the painful process of control-click, Save to Disk, then import into iPhoto.

The new Safari makes life much easier. Control-click on the image you want to save (right-click for multi-button mouse users). The pop-up dialog box now gives you more choices. One of the choices is to Add Image to iPhoto Library.

That’s easier than getting Laetitia to say ‘yes’ when you ask her for a date.

Be advised that the control-click option doesn’t work on every image displayed in Safari; but most. It works every time in Mail.

Got a killer tip that makes your Mac life better than most? Share with others and drop us a note via Feedback.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

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