How to Change a Picture’s Date in Google Photos

Casey Smith uploaded a bunch of scanned images on Google Photos but they are showing the date when the scan was made and not when the pictures were captured. She writes: “Do you have any recommendation on how to re-date pictures that are not appropriately dated? I have a ridiculous amount of photos that are dated as of the date I added them to Google Pictures as opposed to the date they were actually taken. It’s driving me nuts. Any advise?”

There are two ways to deal with the problem. You can either change the date of photos before uploading them to Google Photos or do it after the photos are uploaded. The former option is recommended since it will let you modify the date and time of multiple photos in one go while the latter option would allow you to edit the timestamp of one image at a time.

Both Windows Photos Gallery and Apple Photos for Mac OS X allow you to easily edit a photo’s date and time. Open Photo Gallery on Windows, select one or more pictures by holding the CTRL key, click the date in the Info panel and choose the correct date from the calendar. In the case of Apple Photos, select one or more photos and videos from the gallery and choose “Adjust Date and Time” from the Image menu.

Alternatively, you can use a more powerful command like tool like ExifTool(available for both Mac and Windows) that can “shift” the date and time associated with images by a fixed amount. This is useful if you have taken pictures with a digital camera that had an incorrect time when the photos were taken so the dates can be shifted relatively.

If you’ve already uploaded the pictures on Google Photos, you can still edit the timestamp but you can only do that one image at a time. Also, the date editing option is only available on the Google Photos website and not inside their iPhone or Android apps (yet).

Go to photos.google.com and click on any photo. Next click the “i” icon to open the Info page and then click the pencil icon next to the date to modify the date and time of that photo. Tedious but works.

If you are to edit the date of multiple photos that are already on Google Photos, a less time-consuming option would be that you download them all to the desktop, delete the copy from Google Photos, empty the bin, edit the dates of images on the desktop and re-upload them to the Google Photos website.

And you would still need a desktop based photo editing program to add or edit the geolocation data since Google Photos doesn’t support that yet.

How to Print Multiple Gmail Messages in one go

John Q. Public is an attorney at a law firm and, as part of an ongoing litigation, the court has asked their clients to produce hundreds of email conversations associated with a case as hard copies. They are using Gmail with Google Apps and all the emails are safely stored in the mailbox but how to automatically print them all on paper?

Gmail doesn’t offer an option to print multiple email threads in a batch but that feature is available in Microsoft Outlook, the desktop program. You can import Gmail emails into Outlook, select several messages and then hit the Print button. Outlook will group all the selected email messages into a single PDF file or you can send them directly to any connected printer.

There’s an alternate approach as well. You can select multiple emails in Gmail and apply a common label. Next use an add-on to save these emails as neatly-formatted PDF files into your Google Drive. Once the PDFs are ready, you can either print them through Google Cloud Print or download the PDF files to the desktop and print to the local printer.

Here’s a step by step guide on how to print email messages and attachments in Gmail in bulk:

1. Go to Gmail, select one or more email threads and apply a common label (like To Print) to all the selected email threads.
2. Go to Google Drive and create a folder, say Gmail Files, where the selected Gmail messages would be stored as PDFs.
3. Download and install the Save Emails add-on for Google Sheets.
4. Inside the Google Sheet, go to Add-ons > Save Emails and Attachments > Create New Rule. Here select the Print Gmail label from the dropdown and then select your Google Drive folder.

Click the Create Rule button button and the add-on will save your marked Gmail emails into Google Drive every hour. Or you can go to the Manage Rulesmenu and run a rule manually to immediately save the marked email threads (including attachments) into Drive.

Once all the emails have been saved, right-click the “Gmail Files” folder in Google Drive, and choose Download to save all emails to your desktop. And now you can send them all the emails to the printer with the simple Ctrl+P or (Cmd+P on Mac) keyboard shortcut.

How To Delete Comments on Instagram

The comment section that appears below your Instagram photos is extremely useful as it allows users to exchange their views or make recommendations on the published content and furthermore it's an indication of the interest that other people have in your posts (followers are engaged). Want to keep the comment section of your most viewed posts clean from spam messages or unwanted comments? 

How To Delete Instagram Comments

Open the Instagram app and search for the desired posts. Tap on the Comment button (speech bubble icon) and then navigate the comment(s) you want to delete. Tap on the Trash icon and then select Delete (or Delete & Report Abuse).

How to Change Your Local IP Address

Your Public IP address is what identifies your computer when you to connect to the internet. It is assigned by your ISP and depending on the type of service you have subscribed to, your public IP may remain the same (Static IP) or is periodically updated (Dynamic IP). Basically if you want to change your public IP then the only way is to get in touch with your ISP or use a proxy service such as Tuxler or Hotspot Shield to hide/spoof your IP address. 

Each computer also have the local IP address. The local IP which is also referred as Private IP address is used to identify computers on the local network (behind the same router) and it is managed by the operating system. If required, the local IP of a machine can be changed via the router settings (refer to the manual provided with the router or check on the manufacturer's website) or you can change it via the Windows Control Panel.

Refresh your IP

There exists a simple command in Windows to refresh your current IP, which can be useful to fix IP address conflicts when two computers present on the same DHCP network share the same IP. But it should be noted that this procedure generates a "random IP" (within the allowed range). 

Click on Start > Run > type cmd and press Enter to open the Command Prompt. Next, type ipconfig
 to view the current address. Type  ipconfig / release , followed by ipconfig / renew
. 

Change your local IP

Open the Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change Adapter Settings > Network Connections. A list of known connection will be displayed (Ethernet or Wi-Fi). Right-click on the desired connection and select Properties from the contextual menu. Under This connection uses the following items select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP / IPv4) and then click onProperties: 

Select the Use the following IP address option instead of Obtain an IP automatically (default) and register the IP address (within the pool of acceptable IP addresses and which is not already in use by another computer), Subnet Mask, Default Gateway and DNS Server addresses:

Click on Apply > Ok.

Twitter - How to upload a custom background image

Twitter - How to upload a custom background image

Twitter allows you to use an image/photo stored on your PC as background. The procedure is explained below:

• Connect to your Twitter account.
• Click on Profile and Settings..
• Go to the Design tab > Customize your Own.
• Click on the Change background menu > Choose existing image

iOS - How to copy a link from the address bar of Safari

Here's how to copy a link from the address of the Safari web browser on you iPhone or iPad. The procedure is simple and straight forward:

• Open the Safari and go to the webpage of your choice.
• Tap briefly on the link you want to copy > Select All

• Tap on Copy.

• That's it the URL has been copied to your clipboard.

To paste the link:

• Tap briefly in any text field > Paste.

Lightbeam plugin for Firefox - Who is tracking your web browsing

Lightbeam formerly named "Collusion" (Chrome version) is a plugin available for Firefox that reveals a hidden aspect of the web. 

Features

• It shows interactive visualizations of your browsing behaviour.
• It shows the relationships between the websites you visit and any involved third-party service.

Download

• Download and install the Lightbeam plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/
• A new icon will be created.
• Launch Lightbeam:

• The circles represent sites you connect to and triangles symbolize sites tracking your navigation (you can zoom in/out using the mouse wheel).

Upon clicking on a circle or triangle, you can:

• block the third party service or website.
• Get more information such as the location of the server and sites that are attached to it

• The filter at the bottom right, allow you to change the time period for which you want to visualize your browsing activities:

• To switch to the List view:

• Click on the Reset Data to update the list or graphics.
• Click on Save Data to save your data to a .json file (human readable format).

Clear Cookies

Manually clear the browser cookies or use softwares such as:

• CCleaner
• Wise Disk Cleaner

How To Send Group Messages on Facebook

You need to confirm a meeting with a group of people or remind them of a particular event? You've been wondering how to send the same message to multiple contacts on Facebook without going through the hassle of typing or pasting the message each time? 


Facebook gives you the ability to send messages to several of your contacts at once. The procedure is simple and straight-forward: 

Sign-in to your Facebook account, open the Chat window and then select New Message. Enter the name of the desired contacts in the To field, type your message and click on Send: 

How to Share Files Between Mobile Phones and Computers

Your digital photos, documents, music, and other files are spread across a range of devices from your mobile phones to tablets and your computers. The devices are running different operating systems and therefore there’s no starard method that will allow you to easily copy files from one device to another.

For instance, how you do you transfer a file from your Android mobile phone to your iPad? Or how will you send a snippet of text copied on your Windows computer to your iPhone without emailing yourself? What is the quickest way to move multiple files from one Android tablet to another?

Share Files Between Android, iOS, Mac & Windows

The following how-to guide discusses apps, both web-based and mobile apps, that will help you transfer files, photos, web pages and everything else between your desktop computers and mobile devices easily without needing a USB cable.

The popular and most obvious solution for sharing files across devices is email. Send a file to yourself from one device and then download that email attachment on the other device. For bigger files, you can upload them to Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive from one device and download on your other device(s). If you are on a Wi-Fi network, prefer Dropbox since it will download the file over LAN instead of the cloud and thus the transfer would happen at a much faster rate.

If you wish to transfer text snippets, web page URLs or even clipboard content from one device to another, Google Keep is a recommended option. You can copy-paste text inside Keep and it instantly becomes available on your Android device. iOS and Mac users can install Scribe or BeamApp to effortlessly copy web page links and text notes from the Mac to your iPhone or iPad.

Like Keep, Push Bullet is another very handy app for sending web pages, map directions, text notes and even small files from your computer to phone, phone to phone or between computers. Push Bullet supports push notifications. It is available for iPhone, Android and desktop computers (as a Chrome add-on) while the iPad version will be available soon.

AirDroid is probably the only app you’ll ever need for moving files in and out of your Android phone and tablet wirelessly. Launch the AirDroid app on your Android, open web.airdroid.com on your desktop browser and scan the QR code to make the connection. Mac can install Droid NAS to access your Android phone’s folders and the SD card inside Finder as a Bonjour computer.

Unlike Android, Apple does not provide access to the iOS file system except for the media gallery. You can use Documents or Good Reader to transfer documents, photos and other files from the computer to your iPad and iPhone (or vice versa) over the local Wi-Fi network. These apps can be mounted as a network drive on your computer and they have a built-in browser to help you download and save web files that won’t download in the Safari browser.

Computer maker Lenovo recently introduced the ShareIt app for sharing files and everything else between your Android, iOS and Windows PCs. The app creates an ad-hoc network for sending files from one device to another and requires no Wi-Fi network, Bluetooth or data connection. The interface is beautiful, uncomplicated and all the recipient has to do is connect their device to the Wi-Fi network created by the app on the sender’s device for transferring files.

The popular JustBeamIt service offers an Android App to help you transfer files from your phone to the computer. Just select a file on the phone inside the JustBeamIt app and it will generate a unique URL. Open this URL on your desktop and the transfer would happen directly between your phone and computer over a P2P connection.

SuperBeam is another useful app for transferring files between Android devices. Select one or more files inside any file manager app and choose SuperBeam from the system-wide sharing menu. It will generate a QR code that you can scan with SuperBeam on your other device and the file transfer will happen automatically. If the two Android devices are not connected to the same Wi-Fi network, SuperBeam will transfer files using Wi-Fi Direct or NFC. The pro version also lets you send files from Android to your Mac, Windows or Linux computer (requires Java).

Any Send also makes it very easy to transfer files or even entire folders between devices over Wi-Fi. It’s more like a cross-platform version of AirDrop. You can copy a file or folder to the clipboard and paste it on your other devices visible inside Any Send. You can share files between Mac and PCs or between your Android phone and desktop computers.

Apple’s AirDrop is the perfect option for transferring files between your Macbook and iMac or between your iPhone and iPad. The upcoming version of AirDrop will also let you send files from Mac to iOS devices but until that happens, you can the free InstaShare app. All you have to do is drag the file from your computer to the target device. It works over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and, unlike AirDrop, supports older iPhones and Macs as well.

If you need to transfer files between your Android phone and iPhone or iPad,Send Anywhere is a good option. You can send files of any size over peer-to-peer (when the two devices are on the same network) else it uses the cellular connection. All you have to do is pair the two devices by entering a 6-digit key and begin the transfer. They have a web-app as well allowing you to send (or receive) files from the desktop to your iOS or Android device.

Finally, you’ve BitTorrent Sync for automatically syncing folders between Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone and Android devices. The transfers do not involve the cloud – you put a file in the folder of one device and it magically appears on all your other devices.

Choose the Right App for Sharing Files

	Windows	Mac	iOS	Android
Windows PC	BT Sync PushBullet AnySend	BT Sync PushBullet AnySend	BT Sync PushBullet Documents ShareIt	BT Sync PushBullet AnySend ShareIt JustBeamIt
Macbook, iMac	BT Sync PushBullet AnySend	AirDrop BT Sync InstaShare PushBullet AnySend	Beam App BT Sync InstaShare PushBullet Documents	BT Sync InstaShare PushBullet AnySend JustBeamIt DroidNAS
Android	AirDroid BT Sync AnySend ShareIt JustBeamIt	AirDroid BT Sync InstaShare AnySend JustBeamIt DroidNAS	SendAnywhere BT Sync InstaShare ShareIt	SuperBeam SendAnywhere BT Sync InstaShare AnySend ShareIt JustBeamIt
iPhone, iPad	Documents BT Sync ShareIt iTunes	Documents Beam App BT Sync InstaShare iTunes	AirDrop BT Sync InstaShare ShareIt	BT Sync InstaShare ShareIt

The Best Services for Sending Large Files over the Internet

If you have to share a large file with someone over the Internet, there are generally two options – you can either put the file in an email message as an attachment or, if the file is too big to fit inside email, you can upload it to an file hosting service and then share the download links with the recipient.

Web email services like Gmail and Outlook allow you to send files up to 25 MB in size. For sending even bigger files, you can use a file-splitting utility like HJ-Split that will break the large file into smaller chunks of 25 MB each and you can send these in separate email messages. The recipient can download and join these parts to restore the original file.

You can use online storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive for sending really big files. Microsoft OneDrive lets you upload single files up to 2 GB in size while the individual size limit is 1 TB (yes 1000 GB) in the case of Google Drive. For even bigger files, you can use Dropbox – here the files have no size limit if you upload them to Dropbox through the desktop application.

There’s also WeTransfer — a freemium web app that lets you send files up to 2 GB in size from the browser. You don’t have to register for the service and all it asks for is the recipient’s email address. The uploaded file stays on the server for 7 days.

Also see: How to password-protect files

All the options discussed above have one thing in common – you have to upload your files to the Internet before someone can download them.

If you would like to send a file directly to someone without having to upload it anywhere, JustBeamIt is a good option. This is peer-to-peer app meaning the file transfers happen between your computer and the recipient’s computer directly. You can drag and drop a file on to the JustBeamIt website and it will instantly create a shareable link. When someone clicks this link, the file will begin to download on their machine directly from your computer.

Infinit is another impressive desktop application that also uses peer to peer file transfer and it allows you to send files of virtually any size to anyone. All you have to do is drag the file on to the Infinit app, choose any recipient from your contacts and the transfer will begin once they accept the incoming file request.

Infinit is available for both Mac and Windows and is probably the easiest way to send files big and small. It supports resumable downloads meaning if the Internet connection breaks during the file transfer, the app will pick up from where it left off after the connection is re-established. If you are sending files to another computers on the same network, Infinit uses your local area network and thus the transfers happen extremely fast.

That said, the sender and the recipient would need to install the Infinit app to use peer-to-peer transfer. Also, it is currently not possible to send files from the desktop to mobile devices.

The popular Skype app can also be used for sending documents, photos, videos and other large files of any format to your Skype contacts. Just initiate a chat session or a audio / video call with a contact and choose the Send File option to initiate a transfer. The service imposes no limit to the size or number of the files you can send or receive using Skype and since it is peer-to-peer, no centralized server is needed for the file transfer.

Also see: How to share files between Desktop and Mobile

Teach yourself Touch Typing with Free Tools

Touch typing, or the art of typing with your 10 fingers, can do wonders to your productivity. Most technologically literate people know a bit of typing but if you can type without looking at the computer keyboard, you can get work done faster and gain an edge. Touch typing is also a useful skill to have for mobile and tablet users because when you perfectly know where the keys are, you can “Swype” faster.

Master the Art of Touch Typing

I learned the basics of typing on an old typewriter. Two decades later, I am busy hunting a good typing software for my kid and the number of choices that are available on the web now is mind-boggling. I’ve shared my research here and, whether you are a beginner looking to learn typing or typing to improve your typing speed, this list should help you.

If you are just getting started, the BBC’s Dance Mat Typing should be your go-to resource. It is a browser-based game for kids where each lesson touches a different set of keys and there’s a game at the end of each level to test what you have learned. The lessons would require the Adobe Flash player enabled in your browser.

The next recommended resource is Typing.com, a free website where you’ll find interactive tutorials and drills to help you learn typing step-by-step. Typing Study is a similar resource but unlike other typing lesson that focus on the English keyboard, Typing Study has lessons for keyboards of most popular languages including Hindi and it requires no Flash Player either.

Tipp10 (Mac, Windows) and Typist (Mac only) are desktop software that teach typing offline and you also have the option to upload your own text – like pages of your favorite novel – for practice.

Practice Typing with Online Games

The best way to learn typing is through practice and there are a plethora of online typing games that will help.

The very-addictive Z-type and QWERTY Warriors are shooter games where the ships are assigned a word and you’ve to type as fast as you can to shoot these advancing ships. Type Racer and TyprX let you test your typing speed while playing a basic game of car racing with other users. 10fastfingers lets you practice typing the most common English words while Typing Club allow you to practice individual keys that you you need think need more trainging. Advanced users can try the Typing Karaoke to test their typing skills.

Touch-typing is not difficult and you can become a pro if you set aside 30 minutes everyday for a week or two. Also, it is OK to make mistakes during training but always avoid looking down at the keyboard while typing.

Finally, invest in a good comfortable keyboard – I use Microsoft’s Sculpt keyboard and recommend it highly for ergonomics.

Always Block Google from Accessing your Site’s Search Results

If you are using Google Custom Search or another site search service on your website, make sure that the search results pages – like the one available here– are not accessible to Googlebot. This is necessary else spam domains can create serious problems for your website for no fault of yours.

Few days ago, I got an automatically generated email from Google Webmaster Tools saying that Googlebot is having trouble indexing my website allsoftlearn.blogspot.com as it found a large number of new URLs. The message said:

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site’s URL structure… As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.

This was a worrying signal because it meant that tons of new pages have been added to the website without my knowledge. I logged into Webmaster Tools and, as expected, there were thousands of pages that were in the crawling queue of Google.

Here’s what happened.

Some spam domains had suddenly started linking to the search page of my website using search queries in Chinese language that obviously returned no search results. Each search link is technically considered a separate web page – as they they have unique addresses – and hence the Googlebot was trying to crawl them all thinking they are different pages. 

Because thousands of such fake links were generated in a short span of time, Googlebot assumed that these many pages have been suddenly added to the site and hence a warning message was flagged.

There are two solutions to the problem.

I can either get Google to not crawl links found on spam domains, something which is obviously not possible, or I can prevent the Googlebot from indexing these non-existent search pages on my website. The latter is possible so I fired up my VIM editor, opened the robots.txt file and added this line at the top. You’ll find this file in the root folder of your website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=*

Block Search pages from Google with robots.txt

The directive essentially prevents Googlebot, and any other search engine bot, from indexing links that have the “s” parameter the URL query string. If your site uses “q” or “search” or something else for the search variable, you may have to replace “s” with that variable.

The other option is to add the NOINDEX meta tag but that won’t have been an effective solution as Google would still have to crawl the page before deciding not to index it. Also, this is a WordPress specific issue because the Blogger robots.txt already blocks search engines from crawling the results pages.