Mac OS X desktop and iPhoto tricks
Sat, 12 May 2007
By now we all know how to customise Mac OS X desktop, and that we can arrange icons to the grid to avoid mess and clutter. But even then you may want to place an odd icon a few millimeters (or pixels) off the course.
Say, you want to move Picture 2.jpg a little, you move it to the left, and this is what you get
But what we actually want it this:
Simply press Command (Apple) key on your keyboard, move the icon to the desired position and it will stay there.
Another good use of the Command key is when removing icons from the menu bar. Say I want to remove AirPort icon
I would need to go through System Preferences / Network / AirPort / Configure and then untick ‘Show AirPort status in menu bar‘ …
…or I can simply press Command key, click the icon in the menu bar, and drag and drop it anywhere on the desktop - puff, off it goes.
Viewing full screen images in iPhoto
I was really surprised that some of my friends didn’t know this, even though they had a Mac for quite a while.
When in iPhoto, select an image and click on full screen icon
The photo will open in the full screen mode with the toolbar on the bottom and the menu bar with image selection on the top. Once you move the mouse pointer away both will auto-hide, move the mouse to the bottom or the top of the screen, they will both come back.
The image is sized to fit the screen. But if you want to preview the image in full size, just press 1 on your keyboard. To return to ‘fit the screen’ size press 0 (zero) key.
While you are in the full size mode, you will see the Navigator, so you can move the selection around and preview different areas of image.
This comes very handy when you have images that are twice or three times larger than your screen. For custom magnification you can use the slider on the bottom of the screen
There is one more cool thing about full screen preview, you can open and compare multiple images. Simply, while in iPhoto, Command-Click several images and click the full-screen button, and you get this:
Can it get any better? Of course. Click any of the images on the screen and press 1 on the keyboard, the image comes to full size with Navigator to move your viewing field around. Perfect for inspecting your holiday photos.
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Posted in 
Murphy said: Sat, 12 May 2007 at 22:55
Excellent tips with the Command Key ! Just when you thought you knew it all…
Kit said: Sat, 12 May 2007 at 23:43
Great tips with the toolbar–just note, however, that it will only work with apple-designed applications. It doesn’t remove, for example, StuffIt’s annoying menu or any other piece of user/corporation contributed software :( :(
Pablito said: Sun, 13 May 2007 at 00:28
Very nice!
Joe said: Sun, 13 May 2007 at 05:03
Is there a keyboard shortcut to enter Full Screen Mode in iPhoto ??
Mike said: Sun, 13 May 2007 at 09:11
Not that I know of. I tried to create one in the keyboard preferences for iPhoto but it doesn’t work either.
Justin Allard said: Sun, 13 May 2007 at 16:13
In reply to Kit:
Some 3rd party apps will behave the way Apple designed apps will in the menu bar.
bikeham said: Mon, 14 May 2007 at 20:34
Thanks for the tip for going full screen! One thing that bugs me is the poor archive file (ie zip) support in the finder. Can you suggest a finder replacement that handles zip files better - inspecting their contents and allowing specific file extraction for example?
Christine Newland said: Thu, 23 April 2009 at 23:34
I tried pressing “Command” and then moving an icon to a desired position on my desktop and it did not work as mentioned. Am I needing to configure something in preferences first?