The Perseid Meteor shower is expected to peak on August 13, which means it will be prime time to catch a glimpse of a falling star (or 20). Over 75 shooting stars are expected to fly by an hour, which means you should be able to catch that glimpse not only with your eyes but also with your camera.

There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install software for your desktop or laptop feels daunting. We've pored over pages of recommendations, countless forum posts, and lots of comments to come up with this year's Lifehacker Pack for Windows, a list of software champions across four categories: productivity, internet/communications, music/photos/video and utilities.

We're turning the lens around for this week's Ask Lifehacker. Our Managing Editor Virginia Smith posed a question in our internal Slack channel that cuts wide and deep: "It's safe to delete photos from my iPhone, right?"

Windows: Here's an incredibly useful extension that you'll want to grab from the Windows Store if you have any kind of device - cough Apple cough - that shoots and stores .HEIC images.

Windows: Here's the problem: The HEIF image format, which Apple now uses in iOS 11 in the form of HEIC files, is a great alternative to JPEG. HEIC images eat up less space and support plenty of extra features, such as depth maps and 16-bit colour. Great. Wonderful.

All the cool services are getting data dumps - that little link you click somewhere in a settings menu that triggers the service to send you all the data it collects from you (and everything you've used it to do, theoretically).

Google's Photos Assistant is an amazing tool, most of the time. For starters, it's not too obtrusive, offering users a different take on their photos and videos when it thinks it has spotted a special event or image that is worth a little extra effort. But there's also a problem.

Funerals are a time to remember loved ones and say a heartfelt goodbye, not draw attention to yourself. Still, some people do exactly that. Just because you're all dressed up doesn't mean a #funeralselfie is warranted.

A few years ago I was scrolling through the home page of a large magazine and saw a photo I had taken featured in the middle of its homepage. The pic was a distinctive one of a surprised Mark Zuckerberg that I had taken at a press conference. Where I was sitting when I took the picture and my luck in catching him at the precise moment he made the face in question made for a one-of-a-kind shot. I knew it was mine, and I knew I hadn't given the magazine permission to use it.

Today the Wall Street Journal listed all the data Facebook can grab when you upload a photo, based on Facebook's privacy and data collection policies. The list illustrates what we've said before: Facebook doesn't need to spy on your through your microphone, because you already let it spy on everything else you do.

It's official: selfies definitely make your schnoz look drastically larger than it actually is -- up to 30 per cent. That's according to a recent study that compared photos of people's faces being taken from different distances. But don't worry you selfie fiend you, there's an easy way to fix it.

If you're a frequent user of Google's Image search, then you probably noticed that the company recently removed the 'View Image" button from search results.

iOS/Android: If your Facebook feed has been littered this week with pictures of people comparing themselves to portraits in museums, you aren't alone. The meme started with people who actually found art on their own that happened to look like them and has now extended to people posting pictures of art that sort of kind of looks like them if you look at if from far away and squint a little bit.

Your Twitter feed is likely littered with pictures. Photos, videos, and GIFs can add a lot to a tweet, but can be frustrating to the visually impaired that can't see them.

Every year around this time all my friends start sharing their "Best 9" photos of the year from Instagram. Do we all necessarily need to relive all those memories? Probably not. But they can be fun to look at and share nonetheless.

Sometimes all that smartphone picture needs to reach perfection is a kiss from Instagram's X-Pro II filter. There's just one problem: To take advantage of that filter, or any others in the app, you have to commit to posting your picture on Instagram.

In the year 2017, doctored photos - the shutterbug equivalent to "fake news" - seem to be spreading online faster than ever. Here are just a few of the images we've seen swirling around the internet lately. And none of them are what they appear to be at first glance.

iOS/Android: If you're worried about apps tracking your location, it's not enough to limit your location sharing. You need to limit camera-roll sharing too. If you've ever given an app access to your camera roll - to take photos, or store screenshots, or any given reason - you've also let it see where all those photos were taken. Felix Krause, an iOS developer and security writer, built an app to demonstrate this back door.

Over the course of a year, I take thousands of pictures that I either share on Facebook or Instagram or leave to die on my smartphone's camera roll. While the idea is that I'll go back and look at them at some point, truth be told that rarely happens. The closest I get is when something comes up in conversation, I remember I took a picture years ago, and I search through Google Photos or my Facebook photo gallery to see if I can find it, which I do roughly 50 per cent of the time. Now, Kodak has a new app and Facebook bot designed specifically to help you unearth those awesome memories that you captured by then forgot about.