From The Tips Box: Upside-Down iPhone Photos, Moving Music Libraries And More


Readers offer their best tips for fixing upside-down iPhone photos, moving your music library to a new place, and storing balls of string in your desk.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using the contact tab on the right.

Fix Upside-Down Photos by Holding Your iPhone “Correctly”

Wunch discovers an annoying iPhone quirk and tells us how to fix it:

I usually prefer to take photos with my iPhone in landscape orientation because most of the time I will be viewing them on a monitor in landscape. However, if you transfer those photos to a Windows PC (via drag&drop from Explorer or email), they sometimes display as being upside-down. The same is true for movies.

This problem arises because the iPhone (ever since iOS 5) tries to save time by not actually rotating the photo or movie, but just storing orientation info in the photo’s EXIF data. Neither the built-in Windows Photo Viewer nor the Explorer thumbnail generator read that info correctly for iPhone photos. (Supposedly if you use the “import photos” feature in Windows, however, it will get rotated correctly).

The fix is to use the mnemonic “right-side up”. Take your photos with the right side of the phone pointing up (and the volume buttons facing down). Ironically, this is the opposite orientation to your intuition if you like to use the volume button as a shutter. Also of note: the awesome Camera+ app doesn’t have this problem.

Photo by Nico Kaiser.

Give Your Music Folder a Drive Letter for Easy Migration

Dathbe shares a clever way to make your music easy to migrate:

I have, for quite a while, kept my iTunes library on a separate partition on my computer’s hard drive and given it the drive letter M:. Well, recently I decided to move my music to my NAS. Because I had kept my music on a separate drive letter, making that move was super easy. All I had to do was copy the entire partition to my NAS and map the new folder as a network drive with the letter M: so that the file path to my music was identical. iTunes never knew the difference.

Lesson: Give your music its own drive letter and then moving your music library isn’t a hassle.

Alternatively, instead of creating a whole new partition, you can just mount your music folder as if it were a drive and point your media player to that instead of the original folder.

Use an Egg Carton to Easily Store Balls of String

Steve shows us how to store string without it unravelling all over the place:

I wanted a way to stop loosing the end of a ball of string when it went back in the office stationery draw. My first idea was to simply cut a slit into a piece of card and push it thru that, but felt it it would be better connected to the ball in some way. So after looking around at what was available, I settled on one of the centre cones from an egg carton.

After pushing the string thru a cross-shaped slit in the top then squeezing the cone into the centre of the ball, the whole arrangement stays both compact and easily accessible.

Find Out How Many Bookmarks You Have in Google Chrome

The inquisitive guy shares a quick tip for counting up your treasure trove of bookmarks:

If you’re curious to know how many book marks you have, you can always visit the Google Dashboard and see how many (total) bookmarks you have synced. Of course, this only works if you’re signed in and you have it set to sync your bookmarks.

If you aren’t syncing and still want to know, select all of your bookmarks with Ctrl+A or Cmd+A, right click on them, and choose Open Bookmarks. If there are too many, it’ll give an “are you sure” message, telling you how many bookmarks you have.


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