Safari for macOS lets you view the kind of data cached locally by websites in your browser. Select Safari > Preferences > Privacy, and then click Manage Website Data, and you can see the kind of data stored by every site. It can include Cache, Local Storage, Databases, Cookies, and much more. You can select items to remove them, or even go nuclear and click Remove All.
Those are different categories of local storage, but they’re all managed by the Web site with the permission and mediation of the browser. Cookies is the most likely one to see, as cookies typically contain a login token used to keep a session going as you navigate among pages, or tracking data used by advertisers.
Macworld reader David is having a problem with this, however. When he selects an item and then clicks Remove, he sometimes sees the entry disappear and then instantly reappear. He’s checked that any Web pages associated with the site in question are closed.
Macworld reader David wonders whether a drive used for Time Machine backups can also store other files, or whether that could cause problems. The good news is that you don't have to devote an entire drive to Time Machine backups, although you may certainly choose to do so.
macOS writes all the archived files related to Time Machine to locations within a folder called Backups.backupdb. Everything else on the drive gets ignored. However, as a drive fills up, Time Machine starts deleting the oldest snapshots, which are retained starting seven days after an initial hourly backup as weekly snapshots.
Depending on how large your archives are and how much capacity the drive has, you may want to leave as much space free for Time Machine backups as possible.
I would never claim iCloud Photo Library is easy to understand. Among the most-asked questions to Mac 911 are those relating to how the sync-and-central-storage system for images and video works.
Macworld reader Keiti seems to have run afoul of how iCloud Photo Library manages images and videos, and may have missed a prompt that explained what was about to happen.
Macworld readers are likely quite used to restoring their iOS devices. Sometimes, you’ll need to bring your iPhone or iPad in or ship it off for repair, and Apple has to reset or replace it. Other times, you might hit a glitch—a rapidly draining battery is a common one—where the “best” remedy is backing up and restoring.
But Macworld reader Jim writes in with what I think is a common scenario for which there’s an extra step that isn’t exactly obvious: when you want effectively to transfer the contents of an older iOS device with a newer replacement, but the newer iOS hardware is already set up and running, just not with your stuff.
Jim tutors seniors on Apple equipment at the retirement community at which he lives, and he says his comrades often have an older iOS device they use, and have been given a newer hand-me-down from their kids or grandkids. They just want to transfer an iCloud backup. Fortunately, it’s straightforward.
The Preview app offers raw EXIF previewing, which can let you see if there’s something wrong in the underlying metadata.
Mac 911 recently tried to answer a question for a Macworld reader who found some of their California photos tagged as being captured in China. The answer seemed likely that the coordinates had been tagged as longitude east instead of longitude west, although that wasn’t a perfect match.
Macworld reader Susan writes in with a related question, noting that I’d attempted a diagnosis, but didn’t offer a fix! Too true. I don’t know of a way to fix consistently mistaken location coordinates, but you can change them or reset them.
Apple made it easier to resize partitions—logical divisions of a disk drive into separate mountable volumes with different properties—several releases of macOS ago. A Macworld reader resized their main volume to 369GB to set up a Boot Camp partition, but then realized it was too small. They wondered how to fix this.
In the right circumstance, you can simply follow these steps without having to back up the entire drive, erase and reformat it, and add new partitions.
Always back up your drive before attempting to resize partitions in case something goes wrong, or you accidentally click to proceed on a destructive operation.
One of our readers went through a very frustrating process of trying to figure out why his new iPhone would not charge via the Qi wireless pad on his Chevrolet Tahoe. The iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X can charge via their Lightning adapters, and also ostensibly through any certified compatible Qi charger, too.
He did a lot of work eliminating variables: at his car dealer, an Android phone would charge with the car’s pad, and his iPhone and the Android would charge on a Samsung-made standalone Qi charger in an office.
After reporting the issue to Apple and going through a support process, he was pointed to a document either posted or updated on December 4 at Apple’s site that details Qi compatibility with car models. The bottom line? Some earlier car models have older, incompatible versions of Qi that work with some Android models, but not with Apple’s implementation.
IDG