New High Sierra User Now: Questions

[Robert4]

Hi,

Just installed High Sierra.
Went smoothly.

a. It might be my imagination, but it seems that most everything is now much slower.
I have 8 GB RAM.

Anyone else notice this ?

b. For you Photographers here: how does Photos compare to IRFAN View (under W10) in your opinions ?

c. Besides PHOTOS which is pretty neat, what other "new" apps, etc. should I be looking at
and don't want to miss because I didn't know about them ?

d. Is 10.13 the latest OS ?

I'm pretty new with MAC's.
Are updates done automatically, or is there something to set to enable automatic updates ?

e. Anything else that I should be aware of with High Sierra compared with Sierra that came with
the MAC when I bought it a few months ago ? Sr. Citizen now, and not too sharp with this "stuff" anymore, so thought I would just ask this very general question too.

This has absolutely nothing to do with High Sierra, but let me please take the liberty of asking anyway.
I figure that if anyone knows, it would be you folks.

Again, not really important, but about a yr ago I bought some Cruzer SanDisk MICRO USB
sticks. I have always stayed with Cruzer, as I have never had any problems with them.

The MICRO ones I bought from Amazon are Totally all Red.
I would like to get some more of these totally red ones, but they don't seem to be listed anymore.
Anyone happen to know where I might purchase ?
(what other brands besides Cruzer have proven to be just as reliable ?)

Thanks for help,
Bob

 

[techwarrior]

Slow may be a temporary thing, Finder will re-index the drive after which speeds should be more normal. Give it a few hours.

10.13.3 High Sierra is the latest. Updates are done though the App Store, just like you previously did. You can set the OS updates to automatically download and\or install in System Preferences > App Store.

I prefer to allow downloads but not OS updates automatically, I prefer to kick off the updates when it is convenient as I tend to leave my Macs running with a lot of open apps rather than sleep or shutdown when not in use. While macOS will shutdown apps, some are not very good at auto saving or some even hang when shutdown by the OS (MS Office for example).

As for apps, no telling what your use cases are. There are thousands of apps for the Mac. State your interests and use cases, and folks here will be more likely to chime in. IRFAN View if I am not mistaken is simply a graphics viewer? Preview is built in to Mac and can view most images. And Photos can do limited editing and view most image files. From there, you can go to the moon and back with image editing apps, so a bit more on your use and people will be able to help with more useful info.

My experience with Cruzer sticks on Mac is limited, I seem to recall they have some unnecessary software. I prefer disks that just read and write, no extra stuff. That said, there are literally thousands of USB flash drives, nearly all will work well with Macs. San Disk is a leader, hard to go wrong. Search Amazon, NewEgg, Best Buy, etc for the best selection.

 

[Robert4]

Hello,

Thanks for reply.
Appreciate the info.

Bob

 

[jamietshaw]

I have a PC at work with IrfranView installed. I find it a bit weird – it doesn’t have some fairly basic image editing features but it does have some more esoteric ones. And you can tell that the user interface was laid out by a programmer not a designer – it’s not the clearest of programs to use.

For editing photos, I would say Photos generally has more settings for tweaking the colour, applying filters etc. As someone else has said, you can also use the built-in Preview for some basic image editing including cropping and adjusting the image size.

If you make use of IrfranView’s feature where it loads images from the folder you’re in when you scroll up or down, you could instead use the Finder and Quick Look: select the first image in the Finder, press spacebar to show that image bigger, then press up or down arrow to show previews of the other images.

If you make use of IrfranView’s contact sheet feature, you can instead use Preview. Select all the files you want in the Finder, open them in Preview*, then go to print and in the Layout section, choose the number of pages per sheet.


* If Preview opens all your images in their own windows, change the setting in Preview > Preferences to one of the other options. Then close all those images you had opened (option-click on one of the red close buttons to get them all to close), and try again.

 

[jamietshaw]

PS It's just “Mac”, not “MAC”, it’s not an acronym but just the first three letters of “Macintosh”. Whenever somebody from the IT Helpdesk at work mentions “MAC” it’s a sure sign they won’t have a clue how to solve the problem!

 

[techwarrior]

PS It's just “Mac”, not “MAC”

MAC = Media Access Control, the long hex-decimal L2 address for network interfaces.
Mac = Macintosh, the Apple Computer, not to be confused with the raincoat or fruit.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

One of the nicer, unheralded improvements is the continued expansion of disk space management tools in About This Mac > Storage > Manage...

There aren't new Apple-included apps, and few have changes. However Photos received a fair number of enhancements. I have to disagree with techwarrior on this point - Photos has fairly extensive editing capabilities if you drill down a bit (the interface is designed to keep things simple at the surface). Still, it's not Photoshop, but most folks don't need Photoshop. There are also some nice new additions to Safari.

You might check out the High Sierra promo page at Apple.com - https://www.apple.com/macos/high-sierra/