Merry Christmas everyone! So, are you ready for some more good tips and tricks?

People get so confused about how to back up their iPhone photos. Most want to delete them, so that they can get more space. Also, many ask how to create a slide show of all their photos.

Well, Bucko, I have the best alternative for doing both in one easy step.

Did you know that you can record anything on your iPhone or iPad screen and save it to your Mac? Yes! So, today we’re going to take the photos off your iPhone, save them and even make a slide show that you can view on your Mac.

You’re going to love this one — since Christmas is coming up, you’ll be able to show all your relatives the photos you took this year.

You need to first hook up your iPhone with the charging cable to the back or side of your Mac and keep your iPhone on. Next, we need to open up Quicktime Player on the Mac; click on “Go” at the top of the screen, then Applications. Scroll on down and locate, then click on Quicktime Player. After opening up Quicktime Player, click on “Files” on the top of the screen, then choose “New Movie Recording.” A black Movie Recording screen appears. Next to the red Record Button is a small drop-down arrow, so click on it and choose iPhone.

Okay — we’re all ready for some fun now! Moving your mouse up and down will display the small record menu, so don’t forget this trick. To start recording, click on the red dot. When I did this, I had my photos already opened on my iPhone — I clicked on one of the photos, then waited a few seconds and clicked on another. Then I tried to swipe to the right; the photos recorded much faster, but I didn’t like it. Much slower was better.

When I came to a movie clip, I clicked on it, and it started playing. All this time I’ve been clicking and swapping, it’s been recording everything on my Mac and actually creating one big file. When I wanted to stop recording, I just moved the mouse up or down until the menu with the red dot showed up, and I clicked on it to stop recording.

You can now do two things. Either save the recording to a file name or just click on the arrow to watch what you just recorded. Click on Files at the top, click on SAVE and type in a name for your file.

Okay, so after all that work, what’s the big hype? Well, this sure beats going through the headache of backing up all your iPhone photos to a memory stick or to the iCloud, which could take forever. I just created a fantastic slide show and made a backup of all my photos.

Family Sharing means that any member of my family can share apps, music and even iBooks that I bought and installed on my iPhone — and they get it all for free. Just ask my daughter. She buys all this stuff on the App Store — and it’s charged to my account — and if I buy an app, she gets to download it for free.

To set this up, go to System Preferences and click on the Family Sharing icon on the top right. Tap the + sign to add a family member and enter the family member’s name or e-mail. Remember that it’s your credit card they are putting it on!

Sometimes I want to copy and paste some text from a web page into my Lahaina News articles, but the text is ten times the size of my text in my article. So, here’s a neat trick to paste it on with the same size. First, you need to copy the text from the web page. To do this, just hold down the left mouse button and slide the mouse over the text while it being highlighted. It turns blue. Now right-click your mouse and choose COPY. Great, wasn’t that exciting? I love blue. Now place your mouse on the page you want to paste it on and press Option+Shift+Command+V. Whammo! Your text is all the same size. Microsoft Word actually has a “Paste Special…” (or “Paste and Match Style”) menu option to do the same thing.

Send your computer-related questions to MauiMist@aol.com.