By. 2:00 pm, June 19, 2017. Easily save lots of iMessage pictures and movies all at once.
The ability to save the app store passwords for free downloads from the Mac App Store is included in the latest versions of Mac OS X, anything beyond 10.11 will include the ability while prior versions will not. MacRumors attracts a broad audience of both consumers and professionals interested in the latest technologies and products. We also boast an active community focused on purchasing decisions and technical aspects of the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Mac platforms.
Photo: Cult of Mac You can’t yet automatically save incoming photos and videos from the Messages app in iOS, but there is a way to quickly select a whole bunch of iMessage pictures and movies, and save them all to your Camera Roll. Why would you want to do this? The main reason is search. Once your media gets inside the Photos app, it can be searched and included in Memories. Plus, all the pictures of people will get scanned and recognized.
In short, right now some of your most valued pictures don’t show up in the place you keep all your pictures. Let’s change that. WhatsApp already does this Apps like WhatsApp offer great controls for saving media. You can switch on auto-saving of photos and video, both per person and per group. That means you don’t need to save all those stupid meme pics shared in the group for the folks at work, for example. IOS offers no such thing (although in iOS 11, all your iMessages will be synced across all your devices, so you’ll never lose another pic).
One can only wonder why. Perhaps it’s to stop sexts, or other very personal photos, from showing up in unexpected places, like on the family Apple TV screensaver slideshow. Even if that’s the case, the setting to save incoming media could be off by default, and switched on by anyone who’s not a congressman. As it is, there are two ways to get your images into Photos. On iOS, you can easily select a bunch of files to save at once. And on the Mac, you can save everything automatically, although this includes pictures you send, which could lead to duplicates.
Let’s take a look. Bulk-saving iMessage pictures in iOS To save multiple images and movies at once, open up the Messages app on your iPhone or iPad, then tap to open a conversation. Tap the little ⓘ at top right, then scroll down to see all the images you have shared with this person.
To see movies (and any other kinds of files you have shared) separately, tap Attachments. Tap, tap, tap! Gotta save ’em all! Photo: Cult of Mac This is a neat place to browse all the pictures you’ve sent each other, but here’s the real trick: Tap and hold one of the photos, then tap more. This switches on the multiple selection view, familiar from countless other places on iOS. Tap all the images and movies you want to keep, then tap Save Attachments.
All those pics and vids are now in your camera roll. Set up automatic image saving on Mac On the Mac, you can automate pretty much anything. The Messages app stores your attachments inside a mess of folders in your Library. Find it under HomeLibraryMessagesAttachments. You should probably stay away from here, though, as moving or changing anything might stop your Mac Messages app from working altogether. Instead, you can use a tool called, which we have on Cult of Mac.
Hazel is a utility for automating things. It watches folders, and when something inside changes, it runs rules. Today, we will make a simple rule to add any new photos or movies to the Photos app. To do this, (there’s a free 14-day trial), drag the previously mentioned Attachments folder into Hazel’s Folders panel, and then add these two rules by clicking the + sign and clicking the boxes to build them.
Don’t worry — it’s super-easy. This rule tells Hazel to dive into all those subfolders containing your images. Photo: Cult of Mac First, add this rule, which is there to tell Hazel to run subsequent rules on subfolders. Without this, Hazel would only check the top layer of folders, where no images are to be found. Then you add a second rule to do the actual copying.
This one takes any photos and adds them to the Photos app. You can pick a folder to add them to. I created a new folder in Photos called iMessage. Saving to a folder is a good idea because, if something goes wrong, you can find all the newly added images in one place. I also added a condition to only match photos added to iMessage after a particular date — in this case, one week ago.
This is to prevent all my images being added at once. You can remove this step if you like, but it’s best to wait until you have tested the rules to make sure they work as you expect before doing that. This rule copies new iMessage images to the Photos app.
Photo: Cult of Mac Thanks, Apple And now you’re done. You’ll need to have your Mac running for this to work, but if you’re not in a rush to save the pictures right this minute, this is a pretty good workaround for iMessages’ non-saving photo problem. There is one big caveat here, though: This Hazel rule adds any and all photos you send or receive. That means that if you send a photo to multiple people, it’ll get added several times. Or if you send a photo already in your Photos library, it’ll be duplicated. This may not bother you, or it might drive you nuts. If it’s the latter, thank Apple for not letting you automatically save pictures any other way.
Whether you want to create movies, edit them or convert them to play on your iPhone or iPad, you'll find an affordable app to get the job done in the Mac App Store. Here is out pick of the best apps for managing your movies. Easy Movie Rotator - £1.49 We've all done it - shot a movie on an iPhone then realised too late that we've filmed in portrait instead of landscape. Simply drag and drop the affected video onto the window and click one of the left rotate or right rotate buttons in the corners.
Then watch in awe as the movie switches around to its correct orientation. Sure, you could do the exact same thing in iMovie '11 using the Crop tool, but if that's all you want to do then iMovie is overkill. Motion FX - £FREE is a 'fun' alternative to OS X's own PhotoBooth, offering a range of mind- and face-warping effects that will keep you amused for, ooh, at least five minutes. Watch in amazement as your hair catches fire, your eyes turn into glowing orbs and the scenery around you changes colour. Despite some clever touches, the bundled effects are all pretty samey. And despite the 'motion' tag, you can only take stills of the effects. Usher - £25 Thanks to iMovie, iTunes and, of course, the iPhone, chances are your Mac is awash with videos that you've either taken yourself or downloaded.
But how the heck are you supposed to keep them organised? One solution is - an iPhoto-style cataloguing app that enables you to see all your videos and movies in one place and then tag them, add artwork and play them back. Its best feature though is its YouTube/Vimeo integration, which makes it a breeze to browse and download movies from both services without ever leaving the app. FlipBook Maker - £1.99 Flipbooks are great fun to create, but making them can be so slow. Gets around that by enabling you to turn any movie file on your Mac into a flipbook - the shorter the better, clearly - and then turns each of its frames into individual pages which you can print out. The app enables you to change the frame size, print size and border orientation. The only really tedious bit comes at the end: you have to cut out the individual pages you've printed and then stick them together to create your flipbook.
StreamToMe - £FREE This app is perfect for wirelessly streaming movies from one Mac to another or to an iPad, iPod or iPhone. It comprises two separate apps: ServeToMe for the host Mac and a player for each 'guest'. The two apps can easily find each other over Wi-Fi, with the player able to navigate the folders on the host Mac for maximum flexibility. The only downers are these: movies can be slow to start and stutter thanks to buffering, maximum video resolution is 720p and the iOS versions cost £1.99 each. IVI - £2.49 The Mac and the Mac App Store aren't exactly short of video converters, but does the job right. Its drag-and-drop interface is simple to understand and use, and there's a whole lot of granularity to the application's export settings, which enables you to tweak the final output. IVI even gives you the option to add tags and cover artwork, saving you the hassle of using more than one app to get your movie into iTunes and on to your iPhone.
For even more video conversion goodness, check out the Pro version (£6.68), which is only available from the South Pole store. It adds DVD ripping and support for Elgato's Turbo.264 hardware dongle, which vastly increases movie conversion speed. IMovie - £11 When Apple abandoned the old in 2007, it had home-movie enthusiasts in fits: all the glorious things about the old version - precise edits, support for third-party plug-ins and so on - were abandoned in favour of a squeaky new interface, new video formats and dumbed-down editing.
But with iMovie '11, Apple has finally caught up with its past and made iMovie worth using again. All Apple needs to do now is iron out a few of its curious bugs. Cosmos - £28 is a video and photo manager for your home movies that can be used to store, sort and tag raw footage from your camcorder. Importing is quick; no conversion takes place and your clips are represented by poster frames or as a series of static filmstrips, rather than as video that you can watch. You send just the clips that you want to keep to iMovie for editing. But note that AVCHD users also need Cosmos' sister app, VoltaicHD (£28).
ISubtitle - £14 If you're hard of hearing, is a real boon. It uses Apple's own soft subtitle technology to add resolution-independent subtitles to your favourite movies or TV shows. You can make them magically appear on your, or on your iPhone when you're out and about.
Getting subtitles isn't hard - there are plenty of sources for them online - but iSubtitle makes the rest of the process so easy. Highly recommended. Anime Studio - £21 Dreaming of Aardman super-stardom? Well, you've found a great place to start.
(a hefty 352MB download) gives you all the tools, effects and layers you need to create your own cracking cartoons. The learning curve can be steep if you've never used something like this before, but there are lots of tutorials and pre-built scenes and characters to help you along the way. But the biggest fun comes from creating your own characters and scenes, which Anime Studio makes fairly easy to do.