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As the song goes, we all need a little help from our friends. And that applies to apps for our Macs and iPhones as well.

Fortunately, the apps in the spotlight this week all aim to lend a helping hand, whether it’s tracking down files to free up space on your devices, expanding text or storing clippings to save time or even doing things with the photos and screenshots you’ve accrued over the years.

Do you know of any helpful macOS and iOS offerings? Drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. We won’t be able to respond to every email we receive, but we will give any and all suggestions a helpful once-over.

Crumb

I’m not as diligent about keeping my Mac free of detritus and cruft as I should be, to the point where gigabytes are often in short supply on my laptop’s drive. Crumb promises to do the hard work of freeing up space on your Mac, with some more sophisticated tools to help you track down the files that have outlived their usefulness.

At its most basic, Crumb clears out your caches, which can remove a surprising amount of filler if you’ve not used a cleaner app in a while. Running the app for the first time, I wound up with 2.4GB of cache and logs that could be safely jettisoned — I imagine that number won’t be as garish with more frequent cleanings, but anything that helps me keep my drive free of cruft is welcome.

Crumb has some other modes, like a Visualize tool that shows you what’s in different folders and how much space that folder takes up. An analysis tool can spot whether the content in the folder contains things you’ve created and, therefore, should be reviewed manually before deleting. You can also tap a shortcut button to head straight to a folder to review its contents.

I find Crumb’s Duplicate tool particularly useful, since I’m in the habit of downloading images, tweaking their sizes for stories and then keeping copies in multiple places. Duplicate tracks down the extras for purging, while an Uninstall feature helps you remove apps and any files they leave behind.

The free tier of Crumb entitles you to one full cleanup — a trial of the app, in essence. A one-time $9 payment unlocks unlimited cleanups as well as the Uninstall, Duplicates and Organize tools. (The latter feature sorts things into folders such as Images, Videos, Documents and more.) A Crumb license works on up to two Macs.

Klackey

Klackey is a multipurpose text expander that works on both Windows machines and Macs, though it’s only the macOS version we’re concerned with here. And while some may find the extensive toolset to be overkill — Klackey brings a lot to the table — the text expansion features certainly impress.

I get a lot of email submissions, as you might imagine, and I’ve been struggling with a way to send out a reply that doesn’t make responding to emails my full-time job. In Klackey, I can write a general reply and give it a simple code preceded by a semicolon — say ;reply — so that when I type that code into a Mac app that accepts text input like a mail client, my form letter shows up automatically. I can do that for any other frequently used text snippets I want to store in Klackey as well.

Klackey offers other features like a clipboard history for keeping everything you copy close at hand, a notes tool for organizing your thoughts and even an encrypted secure folder for storing items like passwords. I found the text expansion to be the real selling point, but you can decide for yourself with a free 14-day trial when you download Klackey. After that, a payment unlocks all the current features with a year of updates, with a cross-platform license covering up to two computers.

As I write this, Klackey is available for $35, a discount from the regular price of $49.

MemoryString

You’re not hurting for options when it comes to assembling your photos and videos into a movie that you can view or share with others. MemoryString is betting you’ll give this macOS offering a try for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s free.

That’s not “free” as in you get to assemble a video or two before you’re required to unlock the full app. MemoryString won’t cost you a dime to download — neither initially nor through any in-app purchases. Just grab the app, import some photos or videos and fiddle around with the transitions, titles and audio. (There’s a royalty-free library included with the app, or you can add your own music.) A MemoryString watermark does appear at the end of the finished video.

MemoryString looks to be an alternative to iMovie by getting you to the finished product faster, while also offering more control over your project than the Memory Movie feature included in Photos.

I found that the app works best when you import an image or folder, as MemoryString crashed when I tried dragging things directly from the Photos app on my Mac. However, MemoryString’s developer responded promptly to my bug report.

In other words, it’s a promising alternative if you’re looking for a tool that helps you turn the photos on your Mac and iPhone into moving pictures, and the free status means there’s no barrier to giving MemoryString a try.

Pixph

Just as there are lots of ways to assemble your photos into a video or slideshow, you also have many options for managing all the things you save to your clipboard. So why turn to the $10 Pixph as a place to stash text, URLs or anything else you care to copy? Besides the convenience of having a storage space on the side of your display — or wherever you choose to position the Pixph window — there’s also the matter of organizing all those clips.

It’s easy to copy something over to Pixph: just highlight and tap your shift button twice to capture it in the app. But Pixph also lets you organize clippings into projects, so that if you’re researching something, all the related text strings, links and images you’ve saved are all in one place, ready to move back into the window that you’re working in. Pixph lives in the menu bar of your Mac, and it’s easy to pivot between projects when you find a relevant clip to save.

I found Pixph’s commitment to the Liquid Glass interface a little bit distracting, though it was easy enough to open up settings and switch to dark mode so that the app behind the Pixph window wasn’t as visible. Pixph also treats your clippings as a checklist, with buttons for marking off items when you have no further use for them. Some may appreciate that approach, but it really didn’t fit into my workflow.

Nevertheless, the ability to organize items and even add your own thoughts via a note feature makes Pixph a useful tool for people to add a little structure to their projects.

DumpPixels

If you find yourself filling up your iPhone’s Photos app with screenshots — and then forgetting to delete those screenshots later on — DumpPixels can clean up your photo library without sacrificing the information you were looking to capture in the first place.

Anytime you capture a screenshot, it appears in DumpPixels, which also copies any text that appears within that screenshot. Say you capture an article in the News app because you spot an interesting snippet of text. Within DumpPixels, you can save a note containing that text to the app’s Notes tab. You can then delete the screenshot, freeing up space in your Photos library while retaining whatever information you wanted from the screenshot.

Or at least, DumpPixels will delete the screenshot after you’ve unlocked the app. The free download only lets you save copied text from screens, while a $20 in-app purchase unlocks the deletion feature.

If there’s a limitation to DumpPixels, it’s that it only works on screenshots. If you were to take a photo of a flyer with date and address info, that wouldn’t get copied into DumpPixels — unless you were to take a screenshot of the photo itself, of course. Still, if you find yourself snapping a lot of screenshots to collect data for later use, DumpPixels could be an effective way to better manage all the info and imagery you’ve collected.

One of the most bizarre and sometimes useful features added in macOS 27 Golden Gate is contextual naming in the Finder, as well as other places where a name for a file is useful, using Apple Intelligence.¹ I say bizarre because it’s easy to be surprised by what’s filled in—or that anything but Untitled Document or Untitled Folder appears.

Meanwhile, if you want to rename a big batch of files, you can opt for a little-known feature built right into the Finder, or dramatically increase your power with a third-party utility.

Apple Intelligence has some suggestions

There’s not much to using Golden Gate’s automatic file naming, which is the delight of a feature that’s discoverable, self-explanatory, and useful:

1. Select a file name or folder name in the Finder, wait a moment, and single-click it, so that the name becomes highlighted.
2. Wait a moment. Because Apple Intelligence is involved, some behind-the-scenes analysis of the item’s contents takes place.
3. A drop-down list of suggestions appears, which may or may not match what you want. If one does, click it. This replaces the file or folder name.

You will also see suggestions appear in Apple’s apps when you save a currently untitled document, as well as when you transfer files via AirDrop or text an image to a person or group. I’ve noticed when I text a screenshot on my iPhone, the name “Screen Image” appears in the message text without any detail.

As you can imagine, results vary. However, I’ve found in my testing that Apple Intelligence does a reasonably good job. This includes looking at what a photo or image file represents and suggesting a name derived from that—a kind of hidden Visual Intelligence.

If you don’t like this feature, go to Finder: Settings: General and uncheck “Suggest file names.”

It has a number of limitations:

• Names aren’t always suggested. This may be because Apple Intelligence has evaluated that the current name is better than one it could offer, or because the query times out or is determined to take too much computational time.
• There’s no feedback when it fails—no message appears that says “no suggestions available,” or the like.
• It doesn’t always use the current name as a context clue or, seemingly, pull from our private information to which Apple Intelligence has access. For instance, I clicked a file called “glenn as a freshman,” a photo taken long ago and far away, and the Finder suggestions were: “Person with Hand on Head” and “Person in Thought Pose.” Not inaccurate, but not specific. However, a folder I clicked offered suggestions derived from the folder name.
• Images with controversial elements may not receive suggestions. A picture of my older child from 15 years ago, dressed in a lobster costume that many people thought was a devil costume, gets no suggestions, while other photos of the same type, size, and time period do.
• You can’t get suggestions for a batch of files or folders, only one at a time.

Batch rename your files and folders

Apple introduced a built-in automatic renaming feature in Finder with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It’s limited, but functional, and if you only need some basic replacing, prefixing, or suffixing of names of a group of files, it will do the trick for free.

Long before Apple built basic renaming into Finder, I began to rely on A Better Finder Rename ($30 for all current version updates) by Frank Reiff.² It lets you apply rules to rename files or folders you select, which can include extracting information from metadata in each file to apply unique information from it.³

Each renaming pattern is created in the Actions list. So if you want to renumber files and apply EXIF metadata, you can do that as two separate Actions, as shown in the screenshot.

There are many Actions categories, each of which has context-specific choices for renaming. I’ve used A Better Finder Rename in the past to fix a folder with hundreds of images that were named arbitrarily to extract the capture date, allowing for better sorting. I’ve also used it for picayune tasks, like making sure all the screenshots for an article for Six Colors had the same prefix, to make them easier to find after uploading.

What’s in a name?

In an era in which Spotlight works as advertised, coupled with the new capabilities in Siri AI, do we even need well-named files? Oh, yes, indeed. I would argue that the more sensibly named your files are, the less time you waste trying to find what you need. Visually scanning names organized at least lightly into some kind of folder hierarchy will always provide better results than searching, even today.

This battle has raged since the introduction of the Mac—nay, since the introduction of file names! Good names save time, no matter how well-indexed the contents.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

This summer, I stood up for the Apple TV hardware in the face of one analyst who said that it was “essentially dead” because nobody would spend $200 on a streaming device. I wrote:

Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.

Well, this week the Apple TV got some attention, in the form of a hardware update that came along with another price increase, up to $299. If the Apple TV’s base price of $199 made it “essentially dead” for anyone but the most die-hard of Apple customers, how much more dead could this fourth-generation model be?

While I’m obviously not a fan of the theatrical declaring of products dead because they don’t meet one analyst’s definition of success—lots of products are profitable and successful without taking huge market share—I do think that the $299 price tag puts Apple TV hardware in a really tough spot. (And to analyst Dan Rayburn’s credit, this week he made his point with a little more finesse: At $299 “it won’t appeal to the masses,” he wrote.)

These days, pretty much every TV you buy comes with an embedded computer that means you don’t really need to buy anything to make it work with streaming services. A stroll through my local Costco reveals a panoply of enormous TVs with high-quality screens, low prices, and embedded OSes from Roku, Amazon, Samsung, or Google. They all have all the apps, and all the services.

As a result, the addressable market for an external TV box just keeps contracting. For most people, what’s in their TV will be good enough. That leaves the rest of us, of course: the people who realize that the embedded systems in TVs tend to be slow and inelegant and are even potentially built on privacy-invading surveillance technology. But there are, sad to say, a lot fewer of us.

This change in the market means that cheap streaming sticks, once a mainstay, are essentially irrelevant. They’re no better than what’s in the TVs out there. Maybe there was a day when spending $20 for a Roku stick at Walmart made sense, but those days are largely over.

For the people who do care, who do want something better, the options are more limited. Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is $199. Roku’s “Ultra” is $149. The Google TV streamer, my favorite of all the non-Apple products on the market, is $150.

When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.

In the past, Apple has offered a second, lower-priced Apple TV model alongside the fully specced-up one—the previous low-end Apple TV 4K lacked Ethernet and had less storage space—but that’s not currently the case. I’ve seen some commentators suggest this is a good thing because it “simplifies the product line.”

I don’t follow that argument at all. Having a cheaper product is good, because not only do some people not need Ethernet or large amounts of storage on a streamer box, but lower prices broaden the market! (The iPhone product line could be simplified if we got rid of the iPhone 17e, iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and heck, iPhone 18 Pro Max, but I don’t think that would be a very good idea!)

So why only one Apple TV 4K this time? There are three possibilities. The first is that Apple just doesn’t care about trying to reach people at lower prices, and has resigned itself to the fact that tvOS is an exceedingly small niche product for its most committed customers. It’s possible, but I don’t want to believe that.

The next possibility: Given how weird chip supply and cost issues are right now, Apple has prioritized releasing its high-end product, and will release a lower-end model at some point in the future once it can make enough with the parts it has on hand. Going to market with a brand-new Apple TV 4K in the lowest-end version doesn’t make any sense… you’d always start with the high-end model that is going to be an instant buy for your hardest-core customers who don’t mind the price tag. Then you backfill later with the stripped-down model that maybe doesn’t have as much storage, or those fancy microphones, or an Ethernet port.

And finally, it’s possible that the Apple TV hardware world is in flux because Apple wants to make a different product that hits a lower price point. One that’s less full-featured than the top-of-the-line model, but different enough that it’s not just a variant of the existing product. This is the long-theorized “Apple TV Stick,” and I’m not sure that product needs to exist if the company can just make a box that’s more competitive with the high-end offerings from Google, Amazon, and Roku. But at least it’s possible, and might even be preferable if there are key markets asking for it. (I recently stayed in a hotel with Apple TV boxes on the back of every room TV. Would hotels prefer something a little simpler to install? I honestly have no idea.)

Regardless, as someone who thinks that tvOS—despite all its limitations—offers the best TV media streaming interface experience out there, I hope Apple cares enough to keep it alive and keep it relevant for the small market of people who can’t imagine being stuck with using the software embedded on their TV sets. The masses may not care, but we care, and if that’s not a recipe for a successful Apple product, I don’t know what is.

It just needs to start at less than $299.