Mac Power Users 849: Managing Photos

On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I dig into the wide and messy world of Apple photo management. We talk about pruning enormous libraries, what’s worth keeping, and the cleanup apps we trust to help. We also get into iCloud Shared Photo Library trade-offs and the fact that Apple’s 5 GB free tier is older than the iPad.

There’s a long section on scanning legacy prints with Google PhotoScan and the Epson FastFoto, plus the mail-in services we recommend and the one we’d skip. Set up Apple Digital Legacy Contact and 1Password Families emergency access tonight if you haven’t. The lightning round covers HEIF, Live Photos, and the one Apple setting we both wish we’d flipped years ago.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for Mac.
1Password: Never forget a password again.

What Apple Still Gets Wrong About Watch Faces

I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch since 2015. The face problem hasn’t changed.

That sounds like a complaint, and it is, but I want to be specific about it. The Apple Watch has changed enormously over ten years. The hardware is faster. The health features have saved lives. The battery on my Ultra runs for a couple of days. The watch is great. The faces are still a mess.

For years, I used the Explorer face. It shipped with the first cellular Apple Watch in 2017 and had a rugged, tool-watch look, with cellular signal strength shown as a pattern of dots in the middle of the dial. It was the only face that did that. Then watchOS 11 dropped and the Explorer face was gone. No replacement. No announcement. I had to pick a new face I didn’t want. To this day, I don’t know why they took it away.

That’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder who is in charge of this part of the watch.

Then there are the hands. Some of my favorite faces use a transparent hand outline with the background color showing through. From a few feet away in normal light, I cannot tell what time it is. The first job of a watch is to show the time. There are faces that fail at the first job.

The California face, which I otherwise like, only has a few colors with contrasting hands. Most of them use that transparent nonsense. There’s no second color and no way to fix the problem yourself. Apple ships these limitations and asks you to live with them.

The Hermes faces tell you the rest of the story. Some of the most attractive faces Apple has ever made are walled off behind a five-hundred-dollar band. Not a watch. A band.

Every year around WWDC, I used to tell anyone who would listen that this was the year Apple would announce a watch face store. Third-party designers, a curated marketplace, a way to install the face you actually want. Every year they didn’t. I don’t say it anymore. They’ve beaten me into submission on this.

The contradiction is hard to miss. The platform that gave us the App Store still hasn’t built a face store for the watch. The argument against a face marketplace gets weaker every year. Health, fitness, sleep, payment, calls, AI on the wrist. The face hasn’t kept up with the watch it sits on.

WWDC is a few weeks away. If Apple announces a watch face store this year, I’ll eat my words happily. If they don’t, I’ll go back to my outlined hands and wait another year for the Explorer face to come home.

Coyote vs. ACME Lives

After Warner Bros. tried to shelve the Coyote vs. ACME movie for a tax write-off in 2023, the finished film is finally getting a release. The trailer dropped a few weeks ago, and it hits theaters August 28.

The movie is based on Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker piece, a deadpan legal complaint filed by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Company for selling him products that malfunctioned in spectacular and humiliating ways. The piece is short, dry, and very funny. If you have never read it, that is the place to start.

James Gunn, Dave Green, and Will Forte made the movie in 2022 and 2023. Warner had a finished product on their shelf. The plan was to destroy it for an accounting move, which is roughly the inverse of what a movie studio is for. After enough public pressure, Warner sold the rights so the film could actually see daylight.

For people like me, of a certain age, the Road Runner cartoons are foundational. I watched the trailer and thought, I sure hope they don’t screw it up.

As an aside, anytime the Roadrunner cartoons come up, I’m obliged to link to Chuck Jones’ 9 Rules for Coyote & Road Runner. My favorite is Number 3: The Coyote could stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic. But you should read them all.

David Smith’s Six-Year Watch Map Project

David Smith shipped Pedometer++ 8.0 at the end of April, and the headline is mapping on the Apple Watch.

Smith has been chipping away at watchOS maps for six years. And now we get detailed maps on the wrist. Dark mode. Offline support. An Expedition Mode that throttles the watch to extend battery life when you are way out in the backcountry without a way to charge.

The use case is hiking and trail navigation. If you are off the grid and want to confirm you are still on the right trail without pulling out your phone, the watch is the right form factor. Pedometer++ 8 is what makes that practical.

I am not a serious hiker. I have never wanted maps on my watch. But Smith’s post about the six-year journ ey makes me want them anyway. Enthusiasm is contagious.

There is also a bigger story here. One developer, one app, six years of incremental work toward a specific goal. Most software does not get that treatment anymore. Pedometer++ 8 is what it looks like when an indie developer keeps building, and it is worth supporting.

Carrot Weather Adds Multi-Model Forecasts

Carrot Weather added two features in its March update. Multi-model forecasts, and Storm Prediction Center analysis for severe storms and wildfires in the US.

The multi-model piece is the more interesting of the two. Most weather apps show you a single forecast. Carrot now shows you several at once. They are called ensemble forecasts, and they run the major global weather models many times with small tweaks to the starting conditions. If the runs cluster, confidence is high. If they spread out, the forecast is shakier than the one number on your screen suggests.

That is information you usually do not get from a consumer weather app. A single number creates a false sense of precision. Showing the spread is closer to how forecasters actually think about a forecast, and it is useful when you are planning around uncertain weather.

The Storm Prediction Center piece is US only. Carrot now pulls in SPC discussions for severe storms and wildfires, which gives you the reasoning behind a risk forecast rather than just the result. After the wind weeks we had in Orange County last year, I will take all the wildfire context I can get.

Both features land on top of a Carrot Weather that was already doing more than the Apple Weather app for the kind of detail I care about. I came back to Carrot last year for wind data. Multi-model forecasts and SPC analysis are why I will keep renewing.

Mac Power Users 848: Jason Snell on E-Readers

On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I welcome back Jason Snell to talk about e-readers in 2026. Jason’s our resident e-reader guy at Six Colors, and he reads about a book a week, so he’s earned the chair.

We get into Kindle versus Kobo, library reading with Libby, color screens for comics, and the smaller, weirder devices like the BOOX Palma and the tiny Xteink X4. Jason also walks us through the AI pipeline behind his new Six Colors audio newsletter, and Stephen plays a cloned version of his own voice that was somehow less haunting than I expected. By the end of the conversation, Jason had me ready to pick up a Kobo Libra Colour, which means I’m giving up on the long-standing dream of an e-reader that also handles my Readwise highlights and RSS feeds. Sometimes the unitasker really is the right answer.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

Mercury Weather: Forecasts, beautifully done. Download now for free.
Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for Mac.
1Password: Never forget a password again.

Wispr Flow Is the New TextExpander

The first time I installed TextExpander, it changed how I used my Mac. Snippets I typed twenty times a day became three keystrokes. It wasn’t the most powerful text utility on the Mac. There were heavier options out there. But TextExpander hit the spot: the feature was powerful enough to be useful and simple enough to use every day. That’s a hard place to land.

Wispr Flow has done the same thing for dictation.

I’ve been dictating into Macs for years. I’ve tried the high-end stuff. I’ve tried the built-in stuff. None of it was quite right. Wispr Flow is the one that did.

A few things make it work. The accuracy is good enough that I trust it on the first pass. The custom dictionary handles names like “MacSparky” without me having to babysit the result. It runs everywhere I write, and it gets out of the way when I don’t want it.

Wispr Flow isn’t the most powerful dictation tool you can buy. There are heavier-duty options if you need them. Wispr Flow sits in the Goldilocks position. Enough features to make it worth paying for. Not so many that learning becomes a burden.

And I’ve been hearing from listeners and readers who have reached the same conclusion.

The price is around $10 to $15 a month. I’ve run roughly 200,000 words through it at this point, including the rough draft of this newsletter. If you want to try it, my affiliate link gets you a free month of Pro.

This is not a sponsorship. I just dig the app. That’s the whole take. A tool that brings dictation to everyday Mac use, the way TextExpander brought snippets to it. If you’ve been on the fence about dictation, this is the one I’d point you to.

Reading in the Cracks of My Day

Shortform sponsored this post, but they didn’t tell me what to write. Here’s an honest take from someone who’s been using their service for years.

On most days, I am not the person who curls up with a book for two hours.

I’d like to be. I picture some better version of me with a quiet evening, a comfortable chair, and a thick hardcover I go through start to finish. The reality is closer to twenty minutes between meetings and a few quiet minutes before I fall asleep. Those are my reading hours.

For a long time I felt bad about this. Reading in the cracks isn’t real reading, I’d tell myself. The serious people sit down and put in the time.

Reading in the cracks can be some of your best reading time.

Think about it as picking ideas. I keep a running list of topics I want to think about. When I have twenty minutes, I pull up a Shortform summary on whatever I’m trying to figure out that week.

Last week the topic was difficult conversations. I had a hard call coming up and wanted to think it through before getting on the phone. Not by reading three books on it. Just by sitting with the core ideas for twenty minutes. Their summary of Crucial Conversations got me there. I read it standing in the kitchen while waiting for water to boil.

Five minutes later I was thinking about the call differently.

That kind of just-in-time reading is something I could never do with physical books. By the time I’d found the right book, opened to the right chapter, and remembered where I left off, the window had closed. With Shortform, I pull up the one-page version, get the spine of the argument, and decide whether to go deeper.

Where this gets really useful is with Shortform’s Master Guides. A Master Guide pulls from ten or fifteen books on a single subject and gives you one guided read across them. You see where the authors agree and where they argue with each other.

Shortform doesn’t replace deep reading. A book that grabs me, I still read in full. Some books deserve the long evening and the chair. I’ll keep doing that for the ones that earn it.

What it replaces is the guilt pile. The stack of books I bought because they sounded important and never actually opened. Now I read the one-page summary, decide if it deserves more time, and either commit to the full guide, read the full book, or move on.

That triage is the part I didn’t expect to value. I read more by reading less of what doesn’t deserve a full read.

If you want to try Shortform, use my link and you’ll get a free trial plus a 25% discount on the annual plan. Pick one topic you’ve been meaning to think about. Read the summary in five minutes. See if you walk away with something useful.

That’s how I started. I’m still using it years later.

Focused 255: Feedback

On this episode of Focused, Mike and I work through a batch of listener questions on burnout. Can a hobby burn out the same way work can? What do you do with the guilt of slowing down?

We also get into Joan Westenberg’s essay about deleting her 10,000-note second brain and whether PKM is a resource or just a second attic. In Deep Focus, Mike finally has a meditation practice that’s sticking. He built the app himself in Claude Code.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code FOCUSED.

Mac Power Users 847: Actually Useful A.I.

This week, Stephen and I made an episode about AI. I know. We tried to just talk about what’s working for each of us right now. We get into dictation, AI browsers, MCP, what Apple Intelligence might become, and the smaller weirder projects we each have running.

Stephen wrote an app that finds you good coffee. I wrote an app that helps you say no to things. Both made it into the App Store, somehow. My robot is now resetting Field Guide enrollments while I do something more interesting. It also picks my outfits, and my wife noticed before I told her. I’m calling that one a win.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

Mercury Weather: Forecasts, beautifully done. Download now for free.
Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for Mac.