Quickly Catalog Books or Other Named Items on Shelves

ByEmily Dolloff

If you have trouble finding particular items across multiple shelves of books, labeled boxes, or anything else that’s clearly identified with a text name, take carefully composed photos that capture all the titles without glare. Later, you can search for any text in those photos to find them—tap the Search button in Photos on the iPhone or iPad, or use the Search field in Photos on the Mac. Photos highlights the search term on the found photo. (If Photos on the Mac doesn’t surface an expected photo, try again on your iPhone, which seems to get more hits on harder-to-read text.) This capability comes courtesy of Apple’s Live Text feature, which uses machine learning to identify text in photos. Think of it as the lazy person’s database!

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Social Media: You can take advantage of Apple’s Live Text feature in Photos to catalog books, boxes, or any other items with text names. Think of it as a lazy person’s ad hoc database.

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  • Errata

    Last week a typo slipped by our proofers. Command+M is not open a new document but that command is Command+N. Sorry about that. To make up for it here are a couple more keyboard combinations you might find handy:

    **Command-Option-Esc** – If an app stops responding, you might need to force it to quit. You can do that with a right click on the app icon in the dock, but it’s even easier if you hit this keyboard shortcut. This will bring up the Force Quit dialog, which you can then use to make that non-responsive app quit. You might need to Command-Tab you way out of an active frozen app first, though, or use **Command+Shift+Option+Esc** to quit the currently active app.

    **Command-Option-P and R** – Here’s one that might challenge your fingers dexterity. Fortunately, you will hardly ever have to use it but it is used to reset your non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM). Information stored in NVRAM can include speaker volume, screen resolution, start-up disk selection and recent kernel panic information. If you are asked to reset your P-Ram or NVRAM here’s how you do it.

    1) Shut down your Mac
    2) Turn on your Mac
    3) Immediately after you hear the start up sound, hold down the command, option, P and R keys
    4) Hold those keys down until you hear the start up sound again and then release them.