I like how iTunes automatically sorts my playlists alphabetically. However, iPhoto doesn’t do the same thing for my photo albums. I have to manually drag-and-drop each one of my albums into alphabetical order. Is there a way to fix this?

The answer after the jump.

XMenu lets you create a custom menu in your menubar to store your favorite files, folders, and applications.

I remember back in the Mac OS 9 days when we could customize our Apple Menu with any folders and files we wanted. Is there any way I can get that functionality back in Mac OS X?

iMovie ’08 lacks the chapter-marker feature found in iMovie ’06, but you can still add chapters to an iMovie ’08 project by using GarageBand.

Purchase a movie from the iTunes Store, or extract a film from a DVD with HandBrake, and you’ll end up with a file containing chapter markers that you can use to skip to specific parts of your video in iTunes, on the Apple TV, or on an iPod. Wouldn’t it be great if you could add such markers to your own home movies too?

Mouseposé makes presentations easy to follow by highlighting your cursor and visually displaying your mouse clicks.

Is there any way to download a larger cursor for my MacBook? When I’m giving a presentation, it’s difficult for my audience to keep track of where the pointer is on my screen because it’s so small.

Check out the Tip of the Day after the jump.

CardRaider is one of many utilities that can help you recover photos and movies that you deleted from your digital camera’s media card.

I accidentally erased my photos on my digital camera’s SD Memory Card before importing them into iPhoto. Is there any way I can get them back?

Judging by the number of utilities that help you recover erased photos and movies from your camera’s media card, you’ve obviously made a common mistake. We’ve successfully used Exif Untrasher (free, www.bluem.net/downloads/exif-untrasher_en) to recover images from memory cards.

Other programs that can help you recover your photos and movies include CardRaider ($19.95, www.ecamm.com), Klix ($29.95, www.joesoft.com), CameraSalvage ($49.95, www.subrosasoft.com), MediaRECOVER ($29.95, www.mediarecover.com), and PhotoRescue ($29, www.datarescue.com). Many of them let you preview thumbnails before recovering, can attempt to retrieve files from damaged or formatted cards, and can even securely delete a file so it can never be recovered again. CardRaider also offers iPhoto integration to restore your photos directly into iPhoto.

Create a rule in Mail to automatically assign background colors to incoming messages.

I just switched from Entourage to Mail, and I can’t figure out how to use colors to highlight the email messages that I receive, as I could in Entourage by selecting a category (e.g., friends are purple, family is green, and so on).

To manually apply a background color to an email, click the message in your viewer window, choose Format > Show Colors to bring up the color picker, and select the one that you want. If you find yourself using the same colors repeatedly, you can “bookmark” a color in the color picker by dragging the large rectangle that represents your color onto one of the small boxes that appears below. Unlike in Entourage, your background colors only appear within the ist of messages, and not in the actual window of the message itself.

To automatically apply a background color to incoming emails, you can set up a rule in Mail to color email messages if they’re from a certain person or Address Book group. Let’s say that you’ve already created a group in your Address Book called Family and dragged all of your family contacts into that group. Now you want any incoming messages from those contacts to be highlighted green. Select Mail > Preferences, click the Rules button, and choose Add Rule. Give the rule a description, select the condition “Sender is member of Group,” and then choose the group Family. Underneath “Perform the following actions,” choose “Set Color” and “of background” from the drop-downs,  and select the color you’d like. 

Checking this box in EasyFind enables you to search your trash, plus it simultaneously shows results from the rest of your hard drive in the same window.

I just upgraded to Leopard, and now whenever I perform a Spotlight search, it no longer searches my trash like it used to in Tiger. How can I search the contents of my trash? 

Until Apple brings this feature back to Mac OS X, one solution is to use the search utility EasyFind (free, www.devon-technologies.com), which can simultaneously search through both visible and invisible folders.

Another solution is built into Mac OS X, but it only searches your trash and nowhere else on your hard drive. Go to the Finder, select Go > Go To Folder and type in ~/.Trash to bring up a Finder window showing the contents of your Trash, but this time around, Mac OS X recognizes it as a searchable window. Type your search criteria, and then be sure to select .Trash as the location you’re searching (if you choose This Mac, the results you’re looking for won’t be found).

You can even save the results of this search as a custom search in your sidebar, and then modify it later by clicking the Action menu in your Finder’s toolbar and selecting Show Search Criteria.

This smart playlist will collect every one-star song in your library.

Why didn’t Apple give me a way to delete songs that I don’t like while listening to them on my iPod, and then have those songs automatically delete from my iTunes library next time I sync? By the time I get back to my computer, I’ve totally forgotten which songs I wanted to get rid of.

There’s no automatic way to do this, but you can try this trick (it works with any iPod except the shuffle) to help make deleting songs easier in the future. But first let’s make sure everyone understands the syncing process between your iPod and iTunes: If you use automatic syncing (i.e., you don’t have Manually Manage Music checked in the iPod Summary screen), it’s a one-way sync from your iTunes Library to your iPod. However, there are a few important pieces of info that iTunes pulls from your iPod into your iTunes Library when you sync: purchased songs that don’t already exist in your Library, newly updated play counts, and star ratings. If you manually manage your music, this trick won’t work.

First, use star ratings on your iPod to flag the songs that you don’t like by giving them one star. On the iPod touch and iPhone, click the Track List button to display all the tracks on an album, then click the track you don’t like and drag your finger across the ratings bar to assign one star to the track. On the iPod nano and classic, press the center button twice while the song is playing, which makes the five rating bullets appear, and use the clickwheel to select a rating.

After you sync your iPod to your Mac, you can quickly find all of your one-star songs by sorting your Library by the Rating column. (If you don’t have a Rating column, choose View > View Options and check the Rating box.) Delete a song by selecting it and hitting Delete on your keyboard.

You can also create a smart playlist containing all of your one-star songs. Choose File > New Smart Playlist and create the rule “Rating is 1 star.” Normally when you delete a song from a playlist, iTunes removes the song from the playlist but keeps it in your library. But if you select a track and hold down Option while you press the Delete key, iTunes will delete the song from your library.