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Last week saw the 3rd child in this household reach the 18 year milestone.  

I have two 'mother' tasks that are associated with my children's 18ths - preparing a slideshow of photos for the birthday celebration, and organising a photo book for our new adult. 

The most time consuming part of preparing these things has always been the identifying of photos of the said 18yo, throughout the tens of thousands of photos in our photo library.  

Things have been a little hectic in this household, so there was very limited time for this task.

This time around, the photo identification job was made so easy by the latest version of the Photos app, which provides the same features on both the Apple mobile devices (iPad and iPhone) and the Mac.

I asked my Photos app to scan through all our photos and identify all the photos of our child number 3.  It did this SO well.  In no time flat, I had over 1000 photos of my son to choose from.

Using photos in this selection, I then prepared the required album and slideshow  - all in the space of an hour or two.  

​My very clever husband (who is now the king of photo book making) whipped up a photo book in a couple of hours, also using the album of photos selected by the Photos app.  (I am ready to hire him out as our resident iTandCoffee photo book maker!)

Problem solved!

I must say that the slideshow went down just SO well. It was such a joy to see the family transfixed by the photos on the TV screen, laughing and 'ooh-ing' at the memories they were sharing on his special day.

The photo book arrived 3 business days after it was ordered online - so fast, and very much appreciated by our son.

I see so many clients who have so many duplicated Contacts on the iPhone, iPad or Mac.

The good news is that there is a really quick and easy way to identify and merge your duplicated contacts.

​Find out how in this week's Handy Hint for iTandCoffee Club members.  

​If you are not yet a member, find out more about the club and how to join here »

I heard about this video on the radio recently and how clever it is at tackling a very sensitive issue - one that many of us are hesitant to recognise or get checked.

I won't give any more away - but would strongly recommend that you watch this video and take the test at the end.  For most people my age and older, you may be surprised by the result. 

I am even going to get my kids to watch it and take the test.

If you have set up a subscription with a service provider and have chosen to pay using your PayPal, your subscription will continue until you cancel it.  But how do you go about cancelling that subscription?

You will generally find that the 'seller' or service provider associated with the subscription will tell you that you have to cancel it yourself, via your PayPal account.

Here are the instructions from the Paypal support page, for cases where this is applicable.​

On the Friday just gone, iTandCoffee ran the first class in the 'Bring your Busy Life Under Control using your iPad and iPhone' 2-class series.

One of the areas we focus on in this first class is how to make use of the Reminders app on your device - to help you keep on top of things.

The question that always arises is: What are ‘Reminders’, and how are they different from 'Calendar' entries?

​A Reminder is generally a task that you have for a particular date, day of the week, specific time, or some other repeating day/time interval, or a task that you must do when you get somewhere or leave somewhere.

Typically, Reminders do not have a time period associated with them – they are just things that you want to be reminded.  Or they are things that you would have otherwise put on your written ‘to do’ list.

Before the Reminders app arrived on iOS, many people (including me!) would have created a Calendar event with the same start and end date/time (ie zero duration), and set an ‘Alert’ on that Calendar event to provide a notification at the selected time. 

But the Calendar app is really supposed to be for events, appointments, meetings, social occasions, etc – it is not supposed to be a ‘to do’ list.

The beauty of the Reminders app is that it allows you to see a list of tasks and when they are due – and you can create multiple Reminder lists for managing the different areas of your life. 

You can even share a Reminder list with another person so that you can remotely nag them!

In this week's Handy Hint for iTandCoffee Club members, we look at how to easily create these reminders, and what to do when the reminder pops up on your screen.

Have you joined the iTandCoffee Club yet?  It is currently only $30 per year (with a price rise coming soon).  Get in now to save.  

​Find out more about The iTandCoffee Club here » 

I saw an article this week that I want to share with other parents out there.  It is about an app that is targeted at children and is gaining in popularity, but that could easily expose children to online predators.

The app is called Roblox - it allows players to create the "ultimate virtual universe powered by the imagination." 

Apparently, it has 30 million players each month - many of which are young kids.

Read this article, then I'm sure you'll want to check your child's device to see if they are using this app.

Membership is only $30 per year.  Find out more about the club by clicking/tapping the below button.

If you are finding that Outlook is being too ‘harsh’ in its Junk Mail filtering for your Outlook, Live or Hotmail email account, it is possible to ‘tell’ Outlook which senders should be considered ‘safe’ and to make some adjustments to the handling of ‘junk’ email.  
  
(In this article, we are talking about Outlook as a type of email account.  We are NOT referring to your Outlook mail app on your computer.  The Outlook app is something entirely different to your email account - it simply provides a way of managing all your email accounts, whether they be Outlook accounts, Gmail accounts, or any other 'brand' of email account.)

Adjusting your Junk mail management can be done by logging into your Hotmail/Live/Outlook email account via your web browser, at outlook.live.com and changing some settings.

A frustrating 'gap' on the iPad and iPhone is the inability to create 'contact groups' in the Contacts app, and then easily email or message such a group from your mobile device.

I have just seen a really handy app that fills this gap well, and that is currently free (as at 11/2/17).   I actually prefer it over a previously featured app that includes group creation functionality (Mail2Group).

The app is called ContactsXL 2016 and can be found here ».  

(There is also a paid Contacts XL 2017 version - but the 2016 version seems to work well, so have just been using this free version.)

Try it out and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.