Bournemouth — Sep 20th 2011

Lionel began the meeting with a short Q & A session followed by a brief explanation of Dropbox and its uses. This was a little curtailed by a small problem with the wi-fi connection not allowing a demonstration.

However this was forgotten when Mick gave an interesting demonstration of the use of Smart Folders, Smart Albums in iPhoto and Smart Playlists in iTunes. It was shown how these can automate the sorting of information in the relevant applications although it was pointed out that despite Apple’s insistence that there is a unified approach across applications, the method of creating the smart folder was different in each application. For example in iTunes you select New Smart Playlist from the File menu, whereas in iPhoto you have to hold down the option key while clicking Create and this changes the Album option to Smart Album. Hardly intuitive. Could do better Apple!

However once having understood the eccentricity Smart Albums/ Playlists/Folders are very useful. One should note however for the Smart album to work effectively in iPhoto you need to have a system for giving properly identifiable file names to your photos. Note to self... “Could do better”. I wonder how many of us have our photos still listed as P1110004/5/6 etc.

The meeting ended with a general discussion and it is good to see that at least one of the Solutions staff regularly joins our meeting and we appreciate their contribution.

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