Sifting through hundreds of pictures when you’re looking for one in particular can be a nightmare. Though we still can’t tag our photos or add descriptions in the iOS Photos app, Apple has added a new feature that allows users to search their images by location, date, time, and even album name. This makes looking for images much easier, if you know when or where they were taken.

The following dozen games are either ports of popular console titles, or iOS games that shine in their own right as being console quality. To be included on this list, a game must either be a new release as of this year, or it must have been updated recently to support iOS 8 and Apple's advanced new programming interface known as Metal. With the introduction of iOS 8 and Metal, alongside the powerful A8 and A8X processors that are inside the latest iDevices, Apple has leveled the virtual playing field. It would be ignoring the facts for a core console gamer to say that iOS can't support video games that are on par with console or PC titles, especially if you indulge in iOS' streaming capabilities that allow us to play these great games on a large screened TV. With the graphic capabilities of iOS 8 and the exciting titles currently available for the platform, it's easy to see how Apple's iOS is leading the way in a mobile eSport industry that is on track to bring in a revenue of over 24 billion dollars this year, and set to overtake PC and console gaming's revenue in 2015. As the holidays are upon us again, don't forget that you can gift any of these apps to your favorite gamer via the App Store.

 

When you're in bed reading a really compelling book, you don't always want to stop just because it's late and your spouse wants to go to sleep. That's when you need the low-light Night theme in iBooks. It means you can finish the chapter without the glare of the screen hurting your eyes or disturbing your partner. 

One of the nice features of the iPhone and iPad is the ability to see a photo of your contacts, such as when a call is coming in. You can manually add a photo to a contact by tapping Edit and then tapping Add Photo. Doing so lets you either select a photo you already have on your device or take a photo of the person on the spot. However, there's a much faster way. With just a couple taps you can add photos from all your Facebook friends to your contacts.

A few weeks ago we published a tip explaining how to add an item to a specific list in Reminders using Siri. If you don't specify which list you want to add the reminder to, it will get added to your default Reminders List. But if you find yourself mostly adding items to a list that is not the default Reminders List, such as your Shopping List, why not make that your default list?

iPhone screens have gotten wider, and those wider screens can sometimes be hard to navigate one-handed. If you're having trouble accessing items at the top of the screen on your iPhone, give your overstretched thumb a break and start using Apple's Reachability feature to pull the top of the screen within reach. To use this feature, you'll need to enable Reachability in the Settings app. Here's how to use Reachability, with our without the Home button, to make your iPhone's screen more comfortable to access.

Time-lapse videos can be fun, whether of moving clouds, a sunset, a busy street corner, a tennis player — basically any situation where there's movement or change. Time-lapse videos simply take still photos at specific intervals, such that a slow-moving snail can appear to be speeding along. One of the neat features of iOS 8 is the new Time-lapse mode in the Camera app. As usual, Apple has made it simple.

One of the great features of recent versions of iOS is how deeply embedded sharing is. You can quickly share items such as photos and videos with friends, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Flickr, and more. In fact, you have so many options now that the screen that pops up when you tap the button for sharing can start to get cluttered. Fortunately, you can customize it.

In a recent post I noted that iOS 8.1.1 is now available for download. This morning I added a sentence to that post reminding people to BACK UP FIRST. That's because it's not uncommon for something to go wrong when one updates. For example, when I updated to iOS 8, I encountered an error, and the only way to get my iPad out of it was to restore to factory settings. Doing so means that everything is lost. Fortunately, I had backed up first, so it wasn't a problem.

In iOS 8 you can now quickly access your contacts via the App Switcher by double clicking the Home Button. If you don't want to look at a list of your favorite and most recent contacts every time you use the App Switcher, or if you don't want anyone else to easily see who you call or text most often, you can disable the feature in settings.

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