Peachpit Commons Blog

Grab your iPad and join author Jeff Carlson for a lively Twitterview about the latest tool in a photographers' bag on April 25.

Keeping files and folders organized on my Mac is essential to my productivity.  Folder structures and naming conventions are a big help, but I also need to ways to quickly locate meeting or phone call notes from last Tuesday, or the samples a client sent me for review last October.  One method I use is to add date prefixes to certain file and folder names.  This provides visual clues when I’m browsing for something, and also allows me to sort more easily.  While the methodology works, I don’t like having to keep typing the date over and over again.  Although it only takes a few seconds, it’s repetitive, and sometimes I enter a typo.  Since my time is extremely limited, those few seconds are also valuable to me.  To make life easier, I’ve created an Automator Service that appends a date prefix to files and folders in the Finder.  Here’s how you can do the same...

Our three-month sojourn to London, Paris, Istanbul, and Ireland  is almost over. One of the highlights of the adventure was a visit to the National Portrait Gallery in London to see a Lucian Freud (1929-2011) exhibit that included 100 paintings spread across his entire career.

In my last post, I explained how to create an Automator workflow that can quickly and easily copy file and folder paths to the clipboard.  Then, you can paste them into an email or document to share with others.  What if you’re on the receiving end, though?  How can you quickly and easily navigate to those files or folders?  Automator can help with that too.  Here are steps to build a Service workflow, which will reveal selected file or folder paths in an opened email or document...

If you work in an office, the odds are good that you have shared locations for files and folders.  Your office might have a Projects share, for example, where you keep project folders and related files.

Suppose you need to direct your buddy John to a specific file in one of these project folders?  What’s the easiest way to do it?

You don’t have to have drawing skills to be a designer. But most good designers have developed some illustration skills that are useful for many different projects.

Keeping up with email often seems like a losing battle.  One thing that can help is reducing the number of messages in your inbox.  Filing messages into individual mailboxes can be time consuming and inefficient.  While dumping them all into a single mailbox may seem like a way to create a big mess, Mail’s search capabilities actually make it quite easy to locate specific messages.

Every month in our Photography newsletter, we feature the work of a new photographer who has contributed to our Photography newsletter Flickr group. This month, we chose the image “Soldiers’ Huts,” by Pennsylvania-based photographer Jerry W. Fuqua.

Adobe Systems Inc. today announced that it is shipping Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom 4

You know how sometimes you walk around town and you wander into a 1,600 year old building and suddenly get inspired about graphic design?

We published our first digital photography books some 15 years ago. But it wasn’t until 2006—when digital photography became ubiquitous and better quality cameras became more affordable—that the time was right for industry leader Scott Kelby to hit the topic out of the ballpark with his standard-setting series The Digital Photography Books (with well over a million copies sold). You can now order Part 4 of the series, which comes out next week.

If you have an interest in design at all, one the first things you become aware of, graphically speaking, is type. Type on signs, type on billboards, type in ads and brochures, type everywhere. If you're brand new to design, this typographic awareness can be disconcerting.