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Lightroom Tip: Review and Select Photos in Library and NOT Develop mode

I’ve been using Lightroom from the very first version and I’ve now just realised I’ve been reviewing and selecting my images in the wrong mode. Like many, I thought that if I created Standard and 1:1 Previews it would speed up Lightroom in scrolling from image to image. But LR was still excruciating slow in some situations, eg when an image has lots of complex adjustments, scrolling from or to that image would just bog LR down to a crawl. Especially if there were a sequence of images with heavy adjustments.

It turns out that for simply scrolling and selecting images, make sure you’re in the Library module and NOT the Develop module. In Library, LR will use the image’s standard preview and scrolling is lightning fast. You can make sure you’re in that mode with the keyboard shortcut “E”. It’s an extra key stroke but the difference is night and day. So after editing an image in the Develop module, hit the E key before scrolling to the next images if all you want to do is review.

Fix for iOS and iPadOS apps bypassing AdGuard Home using DoH

When Apple allowed apps to specify their own encrypted DNS server, this was a convenient way for apps to avoid ad-blocking DNS servers. I got tired of the Gmail app on iOS and iPadOS bypassing my AdGuard Home DNS server, just like it can bypass similar blocking services like PiHole. Another example is Safari browser on iPadOS and iOS in Privacy mode will bypass your DNS servers and use an Apple specified DNS over HTTP server. If you use a standard (ie unencrypted) DNS server, this will be bypassed.

It turns out it’s relatively easy to stop this from happening.

You need to specifiy a DNS over HTTPS (DoH) server via a configuration profile as this will override any specific DoH server that has been done in an app. Since AdGuard Home can serve as a DoH server, all you have to do is turn on this feature and install a configuration profile that points to it.

The steps are:

  1. Turn on Encryption settings in AdGuard Home (see screenshot above)
  2. Use your preferred method of getting a SSL certificate for your AdGuard Home server. LetsEncrypt is the most common method
  3. You’ll probably want add a rewrite rule to point the name of you DoH server to an internal IP address
  4. Download iMazing, the excellent and free Configuration Profile tool
  5. Make a profile with a DNS Setting payload (see screenshot below)
  6. Save and install the profile on your i-Device

No more AdGuard bypass by apps!

Amex PDF statements missing fonts

Around November 2023, American Express Australia changed the format of the PDF statements by not embedding the font. This made rendering of the page virtually unreadable on macOS. Inspecting the PDF shows that it uses two fonts from the Bento Sans family.

To make the pages render properly, the fonts can be downloaded from sites like https://fontsgeek.com/tagged/styles/bentonsans

After installing the fonts, restart your PDF reader and all should be good.

How to download 200GB of photos off iCloud

Apple doesn’t make this easy. When your iCloud storage is full and you want to download 200GB of photos to free up space, one of the options, and arguably the most reliable, is to request Apple to compile the data via a request at privacy.apple.com. You can read about the issue with other methods in this recent Reddit post. Apple will email you when the compilation is ready. Here is a screenshot of a request to download almost 200GB of photos with a maximum size of 25GB per part.

Note that the 25GB size is a pretty loose limit with 5 of the parts exceeding the limit. More importantly, requesting concurrent downloads yields unreliable results. Make sure you monitor the expected size of each part as the download may silently terminate early like part 3 which failed at 3.9MB instead of 31GB. You’ll also note that the download speed seems to be capped at around 7MB/s at the sending server’s end. These downloads were on a Gigabit Internet connection.

But if you persevere, the downloads will all complete and you’ll be able to download your files from iCloud.

After all the parts have been downloaded, unzip the file and you’ll find a Photos folder in each part. I suggest you create a new album in the Apple Photos app and import all the files into Photos. This is a convenient way to review your photos archive library. All the media types like Live Photos, Videos, Portraits seem to work with the import. As does People and Pets.

Tips on using Migrate Guru to move a WordPress Multi-site with FTP

 

I wanted to move a WordPress Multisite from Digital Ocean to a Raspberry Pi running on my LAN. The total size of the sites was just over 1 GB. After checking Google, it seems the Migrate Guru plugin could do the job. After several failed attempts, it finally worked and here are my tips, and limitations:

  1. If you’re moving a Multisite, create a working Multisite with a couple of sites on your destination server before starting the migration. If you just have a standard site the migration failed for me with redirection errors.
  2. I had an ftp server setup on the destination server but I could never get Migrate Guru to work with FTP. Rather, install the Migrate Guru plugin on the destination server and copy the Migration Key into the Migrate Guru’s migration page on the origination server. This method seems to use http as the transfer protocol and you don’t need to enter any IP address or site URLs.
  3. The migration took around 3-4 hours to complete for my 1 GB and 8 web sites.

After the transfer, if you want to have the same primary site as the origination server, you’ll need to edit the wordpress database tables. Otherwise, the primary site will be the name you setup prior to the transfer.

You may also need to update your DNS records to point the host to the new IP address, create virtual host files in your Apache configuration as well as getting SSL certificates for all the hosts.