Apple has rolled out the new Music program and is offering a 90-day free trial. Should you bite? Or will you regret it? Come to our August 27th meeting at Metrum Credit Union to learn what you need to know! Mark will be giving us all the details, including how this new program might work for you — and whether it fits the way you prefer to acquire, organize, and listen to music. Please join us at 6:30!

Do you have a photo editor on your Mac? If you rely on either iPhoto or the new Photos app, you don't. We saw in June that these Apple applications can only do the most basic of touch-ups on our digital photos. After we compared them with Pixelmator, Adobe Photoshop Essentials, and Photoshop, we agreed that Pixelmator is a great program for those who don't need the full power of Photoshop, but still want to do good things with photos. And it's less than $30 in the Mac App Store! So join us on July 23rd for a step-by-step overview of the basic functions — a great chance to learn the basics.

The next presentation in our series on Digital Photography Essentials answers the question, "I've got my scan — now what do I do?" As we saw in May, scanner software can offer some tools for capturing a better version of an old photo, slide, or negative, but there's often more work to do to get the best possible version. How do you go about it? Which software programs can do what kinds of corrections? Which will work best for your needs? When do you go DIY and when do you get professional help? Find out on June 25th!

Our lively January meeting inspired a new series of presentations on the topic of Digital Photography Essentials. In this session, we'll be talking about what we must do before we work on photographs — and the first thing is to calibrate our monitors. After all, we can't judge how our photo looks if our monitor does not display accurately.

The release of Photos is just around the corner! Join us on April 23 at the Metrum Credit Union at 6:30 pm to learn all about this new-from-the-ground-up program that replaces Apple's venerable iPhoto. Mark Stevenson has been working with the beta version and will have great information to share with us.

Here are some of the need-to-know topics: what it takes to run Photos, how to make the transition with the libraries you currently have, the kind of clean-up you should do before the move, and what the program offers in terms of features. We'll

We've talked about printing photos in all sorts of ways — it's time to talk about sharing digitally. We'll cover iCloud Photo, which gives you access to your entire lifetime library of photos from any of your devices, as well as talk about all of the other photo sharing services available.

Join us on Thursday, March 26, at 6:30 pm at the Metrum Credit Union. Bring an Apple device and have fun doing a little sharing on the spot!

Sorry for the late notice, but with another band of snow coming in this afternoon and low temperatures, we're canceling our meeting tonight.

The February topic will be offered later this year (when the weather is better!). Stay tuned for the March topic!

Join us on Thursday, January 22, for the first Multimedia SIGⁱ meeting of 2015! We meet at Metrum Credit Union and get started at 6:30 pm to talk about what we do with photos and share ideas. Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about organizing photos, keeping them safe, and adding tags and metadata — but we haven’t talked about what we do with our photos for a long time. What’s the point of having them sitting on the hard drive if we don’t make some use of them?