Keyboard shortcut to play video in the Photos

Is it possible that there is no keyboard shortcut to play video in the Photos app? I can play video only with my mouse. There is a shortcut to crop and adjust color, which are by far less used features.


Also pressing space closes and opens the video?? That is not common in any video player. Why Apple broke the common usage pattern here, and even completely removed a shortcut to simply play the video without messing with a mouse or a Touch Bar. Without even making an option to manually add a shortcut for this. For this very common and literally the most used action.


Who did this lousy UX on this? And is there any fix?




Boris's MacBook Pro 15"

Posted on Sep 18, 2021 8:16 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 18, 2021 10:10 PM

Hi thebrightestday,

Option-Space bar should make a magic. I tried - it works for me.


There is list of all shortcuts: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/photos/pht9b4411b24/mac

6 replies

Sep 18, 2021 11:03 PM in response to thebrightestday

Actually my bad, that works. Thanks again.


But c'mon Apple, two keys for play/pause? And why not following the common pattern that I mentioned. Why not the opposite, Space for play/pause and Option-Space for closing it?


Pros of how this feature is implemented:

  • none (please someone correct me if I am wrong)


Cons:

  1. Two keyboard keys instead of one
  2. Those two keys are not even beside each other making it harder to press correctly
  3. They are two unknown keys
  4. The Space key works differently than in most other video software
  5. As a matter of fact, the Space key closes the window, so it is another frustration and one more click to reopen
  6. Breaking a common usage pattern which brings extreme frustration (repetitive) as users got used to playing videos with the Space key almost everywhere like Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, almost all video players, even Quick Time lol
  7. This means no consistency across macOS as well
  8. Making this hard to fix now, as now some users got used to this shortcut and reverting it back to common behavior will be a problem for them


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Keyboard shortcut to play video in the Photos

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