Boot-up
Any follow-up on our Tidying-up Photos session last time?
Phishing quiz – https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/google-quiz-help-spot-phishing-emails/ – any feedback? [Ted was concerned about providing his details at the start of the Quiz. His fears were understandable, but unnecessary – read the Comment beneath this post, from me.]
Jim’s keyboard experience
My iMac adventure [Update: Not only did I get a free drive, but a free screen AND a replacement case which had a dent in it – possibly caused by Apple they admitted/offered/suggested.]
Any other member issues?
News
Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram to possibly share same messaging infrastucture – BBC report, Cult of Mac article.
Have yourself a digital calling card, or alternatively create an online presence; for instance – this is me.
Keyless cars at risk of theft. [Sianed advised us that VW are apparently the worst and uses a lined purse for her keys, the same as the one she puts her contactless cards in.]
Protect your browsing history with a VPN. [We’ll come back to look at VPNs another day.]
Facebook in-house developers blocked by Apple, and Google too!
Google+ closing down in April. [Don raised this issue. If you’ve got a Google+ account then it will cease to work after April 1st. Google allow you to “Takeaway” your data – I gave a link to this in the previous notes – I believe you can’t do the same with your Facebook information.]
Google launches apps to help the hard of hearing (volunteers?). [Thanks Ted, Martin and Jim for offering to look at this, which is only (I know see) available for Android devices, so you might not be able to do the testing. Apologies if this applies.]
How to Back-up your iCloud Photo Library.
Google’s contribution to Internet Safety Week, including Protecting your data wherever you go on the web.
Mesh WiFi router firm bought by Amazon. [Thanks Paul for volunteering to research Mesh WiFi systems for us for the next meeting.]
Samsung’s first TV with Apple’s Airplay 2 now on sale (US only?).
Digital Image Editing using Gimp
Gimp stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and was written originally for the operating system GNU but has been ported to many other platforms including Windows and MacOS; GNU stands for GNU’s Not Unix; it’s open source software; it’s free and it can be trusted.
You can download Gimp for your computer from this link. User documentation is available from this link, and some tutorials are available here.
So first of all you need to Install Gimp.
For today, I’m just going to concentrate on a couple of areas
A simple introduction to Gimp, including changing the size of an image, and cropping an image.
Using curves to improve the quality of the colour in an image
However, I can’t recommend using Gimp. It’s a techies toy, not really a usable photo-editing tool. So what do I suggest for free photo-editing?
For tablet/smartphone users it has to be Snapseed (from Google) which is available for both Android and iOS platforms. A tutorial on what you can do it with Snapseed is provided here. You could also try Adobe Photoshop Express.
For Windows there’s Adobe Photoshop Express, or you could try Microsoft Photos.
For Mac users you really only have their Photos app as Photoshop Express is not available for MacOS, so it’s Gimp or maybe Fotor which you can get from the Apple Appstore – but I don’t have any experience of using it. I don’t think I can recommend using Picasa any longer.
If you want to do your photo-editing online, then apart from Google Photos and editing your photos stored in iCloud (for Mac users), you should look at Pixlr, which has a whole range of free and chargeable offerings that run from your browser and in particular Pixlr X which doesn’t require Flash, looks really good and easy to use, and is probably better investing time and effort in than trying Adobe Photoexpress Online, which is a bit clunky and requires Adobe Flash Player to be installed.
