I’m jealous: my buddy has a Mac and when he downloads pictures from his camera onto his computer, they all end up with nifty little preview icons that make it easy to pick out which pictures to view. When I download pictures onto my Mac, however, I get these stupid generic “JPEG” icons instead. What’s wrong and how do I fix it? This is a bit of a mystery to me too, I have to admit. Sometimes Mac OS X seems to automatically generate preview thumbnail icons for images, but other times there’s no preview associated with a given file so you get the generic icon instead. Fortunately, it’s really easy to update a generic JPEG icon to be a preview image instead using the splendid program that’s probably already on your computer. If not, download a copy.

It’s a superb piece of shareware, well worth the registration fee, and I’ve been using it daily for years. With GraphicConverter installed on your Mac, here’s how you fix a given folder. First off, start out with a folder that either has no preview icons, or has a mix of some previews, some not. Here’s the one I’ll use: In GraphicConvert, choose File –> Convert & Modify to get here: On the very top, make sure you’ve selected Create Icon/Preview, as shown, then on the left pick the specific folder you want to fix or, if you have a lot of icons to build, pick a parent folder (like “Pictures”) and let it build icons for every photograph in any subfolder at that point: Once you have the correct folder or parent folder selected, click on the Go button on the very top (do not click on any of the buttons on the bottom of this dialog window, however!). In just a few seconds, the icons you desire will be automatically created for every photograph and graphic file in the area you specified. That’s all there is to it!

Just like on the iPhone, Photos for Mac lets you edit a Live Photo and enable or disable the live part of it. Click edit then toggle the yellow or white Live Photos icon in the top center: yellow.

Soundcloud player for mac. Now when I look at that same folder in the Finder it’s much nicer: Hope that’ll help you fix things. If someone has the scoop on how to have Image Capture or any other app automatically create preview icons, please do add a comment so we’ll all know.

When I go to log in to my iMac, the picture associated with my account is a daisy. How do I change my user account photo or picture on my Mac OS X “Mavericks” system?

I know plenty of people who would be happy to have a cheery daisy as the picture associated with their accounts, actually. Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with no daisy! But I can also understand if that’s not the best picture available for you and that you’d rather have a different picture — or maybe a photo of yourself — associated with your Mac OS X user account. On the other hand, I will note that the only time I ever see the picture is on the login screen, so if you have a system that’s always just logged in to your account, you might not see that more than once or twice a month. So that’s not a lotta daisy to have to deal with 🙂 There are a couple of ways to change this picture, but I’m going to show you the easiest way, via Google image search, because there are a zillion pictures out there you can utilize, rather than just the dozen or so from Apple HQ.