Progress is a funny thing…

By | April 8, 2019
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Progress is a funny thing.

After all, all this technology that can be so helpful wouldn’t exist if people didn’t keep changing things and bringing out new versions.

And sometimes I’m amazed when a company adds a new feature… or sometimes it takes me a while to realise how useful it is.  (For example, I admit when I first heard of phones with cameras built in, I just thought “why?” – now I use it a lot.)

But at other times when something changes or a new feature is added it can be a pain… and actually make things harder.  Especially since they don’t usually explain what it is and how it works properly… or if it stops you doing things the old way.

Anyway, I’m not just rambling on randomly.  I had an email the other day that made me think about this.  Here’s the email:

Hello,
Thank you for this week’s tips – enlightening, as usual.
Over the past few months something’s appeared in photos on my iPhone called ‘burst’, which threatens to delete several photos at a time, even if I only want to delete one. Would it be possible to address it in one of your weekly emails?
Confused,Rita

Most people with iPhones (or iPads) will have had this feature for a while – but it’s frustrating when something like this just changes on your phone, PC or tablet… and confusing because there’s usually no explanation of how it should work.

What this burst mode does is quite clever, though.  When you take a photo with the photo app on an iPhone now, if you just tap the “take photo” button briefly, it works as it used to.

But if you hold it down for even a short time, it takes a burst of photos – one after another.

(This doesn’t work if you have the flash on or in one or two other situations – but normally it does.)

The idea is it makes it easy to take several photos and pick the best.  This is part of the advantage of digital photos, in my view – you can take lots without spending a fortune on film, then pick the ones that turned out OK!

Then the iPhone stores that “burst” of photos together, almost as if it was one photo, rather than splitting them up into separate photos.  So if you go to delete one, it warns you that it’s not just deleting one individual photo, but the whole burst. (But not all your other photos.)

You might want to delete just part of the burst, though.  After all, it’ll have several nearly identical photos – you probably only want to keep one.  To get rid of the others in that burst, find the burst in your photos (the photos in the burst will be all grouped together, so it looks like a stack of photos on top of each other) and tap on it and tap select.  Then tap the one you want to keep and mark it as your favorite by tapping the heart symbol. Then tap Done and then on “Keep only 1 favorite” – and it’ll get rid of the others from that burst.

The thing is, it’s easy to end up using this burst mode and taking several photos at once without even realising it, if you tap the button to take a photo a bit slowly.  But at least now you know what’s going on, you know if you tap a bit quicker when you take photos it’ll only take one and you know how to get rid of the extra photos if you do end up taking them…

And sometimes it can actually be handy!

Anyway, I mentioned last time about our Tech Inner Circle.  Well, we’ve been busily getting things ready to accept new members and we’re just about ready now…

So as of Thursday 11th April at 10 in the morning (UK time), we’ll open the doors to new members.  

I’ll send out an email when the doors open, with all the details about what’s included, what kind of technical help you get, who it’s for and so on – including how to join, of course.  

So watch out for that on Thursday at 10am!

One thought on “Progress is a funny thing…

  1. Marg8A

    I really like your “tips” you are kind enough to sort them out and make them clear so silver surfers like me don’t have to worry about new things..
    Particularly likes the one today on photos and”bursts “ thanks Tim

    Reply

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