In High Sierra, you can block auto-play videos by default but still white-list your favorite sites. Then again, when you visit sites that make good videos, you might not mind. You’re trying to read an article, and then boom, all of a sudden there’s a commercial blaring in the sidebar, and it ruins the experience. Auto-play videos only on your termsĮveryone who browses the web has been annoyed by an auto-playing video. You can turn this off in Safari’s preferences if you like, but it might be nice to not have the things you buy online haunt you for weeks on end. You know how after you shop for something online, you keep seeing that same thing advertised everywhere else you go? Safari will use machine learning to keep advertisers from tracking your behavior, while letting useful cookies stick around. Upgrades to SafariĪpple’s own web browser works even harder in High Sierra to keep annoying ads and autoplay videos from driving you bananas. This will give you more choices and different projects, like framed prints, wall decals, websites, and more. Photos always had Apple’s own print products like books and cards, but in High Sierra, you can also create new projects with third-party services like Shutterfly, WhiteWall, iFolor, Wix.com, Mpix, and Mimeo, from right inside the Photos app. You can right-click a photo in Photos and choose Edit With from the contextual menu to open that photo in another editor like Photoshop and Pixelmator-or even Setapp apps like CameraBag Pro and Tayasui Sketches. High Sierra makes it easier to use Photos to organize your photo collection, but still send them off to another app for editing. This is great if you take Live Photos of people-if, for example, someone has her eyes closed in the key frame chosen by default, you can drag the selector box around to find a frame where everyone is actually looking at the camera. You can also edit a live photo to trim off any unwanted parts, and select the key frame from any frame of the video. The same Live Photo effects are supported in High Sierra on the Mac, and they’re nondestructive, so you can try out an effect on any Live Photo without altering the original.
And Long Exposure is good for nature shots and landscapes, smoothing out any moving parts like a rushing river or a highway full of cars. Loop is like a GIF that plays over and over forever. Starting in iOS 11, the Photos app can convert those into three new Live Photo types: Bounce is kind of like Instagram’s Boomerang, showing the same action backwards and forwards. When you take Live Photos with an iPhone, the camera captures three seconds of video. A new Selective Color feature lets you saturate just one color, if you want to make your subject’s eyes or lipstick, for example, really pop. It’s also got a new Curves feature in the editing panel, which is a lot more intuitive than the Curves feature in Photoshop. But aside from handy interface tweaks, Photos has some very useful new features too. For example, the new always-on sidebar making it much easier to find what you’re looking for. Still, this is also an under-the-hood improvement that won’t Photos for MacĪpple’s Photos application gets a big overhaul in High Sierra. HEVC compresses video files up to 40 percent more without losing quality, which is a big deal considering how many devices shoot in 4K these days. That way, videos you shoot with your iPhone stay in HEVC format when you transfer them to a Mac, which keeps HEVC’s superior compression intact.
HEVC support comes to macOS High Sierra as well. With iOS 11, iPhones and iPads are saving videos in HEVC format, or High Efficiency Video Codec, also known as H.265, since it’s the successor to H.264. This is a pretty under-the-hood improvement that most users probably won’t notice. If your Mac has a Fusion drive or a traditional spinning hard drive, you won’t get APFS right away. It’s a 64-bit architecture with built-in encryption and designed to speed up common tasks like copying big files. If your Mac has all-flash storage (an iMac with an SSD, or any recent Apple laptop), High Sierra will bring with it a new file system called APFS, or Apple File System.
But while you may not notice these changes, they should make your Mac more efficient, which can save you battery life as well as speed up tasks. The biggest changes in High Sierra aren’t even user-facing features. What are the new features in macOS High Sierra? These are the best 17 features, tips, and tricks for macOS High Sierra. It’s not a huge release in terms of new features, but there are a few things that can make your life easier. The newest version of Apple’s desktop operating system, macOS High Sierra, was launched on September 25.