Space bar won't open photos in Mojave

You are not alone with this sentiment, see:

Re: Is v.4 of Photos (Mojave) different than v.3?

The spacebar is now used to start and stop videos - a video will play a preview in the thumbnail and I can start and stop it by hitting the space bar. It is now similar to iMovie, but to quickly open or close an image i have now to use the return key.

I love Apple, but sometimes they do the stupidest of things. Why change the spacebar function?? Going on a limb here and saying people take more photos than videos, so it makes more sense to use the function for PHOTOS! At the very least, give us the option to choose which one we prefer.

The logic of Apple design is becoming stranger and stranger. Why change spacebar to return? People usually use the right hand to navigate in the trackpad and the left one to open file. now you can navigate and open the photos using your right hand only and it's not the best way to do this.

Go to preferences > keyboard > shortcuts > app shortcuts > Photos > and add a shortcut. For Menu Title enter "Open Viewer" and for the keyboard shortcut press the spacebar whilst holding the Fn key. Add another one for "Close Viewer". Problem solved

Hey, Eric in Boca.. Thanks!!!

FYI.. to others: I don't have the option for "Photos" in 'app shortcuts' (see images below).. but fortunately, I was still able to add the two shortcuts per his post and it works in Photos. 🙂

johnesquivel,

The "Photos" item will be added to the list, when you click the "+" button to add a new shortcut, and then select "Photos" from the "Applications" drop-down menu at the top of the panel. It is safer to restrict your new shortcut to Photos, so it will not interfere with other applications.

If you want to get the Space bar functionality back and make the rest of your workflows more efficient use a macro app like Keyboard Maestro which can be used to launch apps, open folders and or documents, enter text, etc. with a single keystroke or simple key combination. I use it and have over 250 macros which I use to shorten my workflow and speed it up. Entering the Keyboard Maestro URL link was one of them.

Works perfectly, thanks.

Apple is supposed to avoid us having to do workarounds like this.

If Jobs were alive, someone would get the sack over this.

I've left feedback

www.apple.com/feedback/photos

everyone else who's annoyed should too.

Thanks! I just followed your link and left this feedback for Apple:

This is one of the most ridiculous, unnecessary, and out-of-touch changes I've ever seen. I have way more photos than videos, so your trying to somehow be consistent with video viewing in your shortcut change has caused me a huge amount of trouble. There is a good workaround published on line. You should check it out.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8554200?answerId=33928019022#33928019022

You may want to look at the date of the post, artist999, September 26, 2018. That was two days after Photos 4.0 and Mojave had been released. At that time we were still wondering, if this is a bug or intentional. The day before the Photos User Guide had still been describing the space bar shortcut like it has always been, so it looked like a bug. I posted my reply after I had seen, that Apple had updated the list of keyboard shortcuts to include the new behavior, when it became clear, that the changed behavior is unfortunately fully intentional (Photos keyboard shortcuts on Mac - Apple Support). If it were a bug, unexpected, incorrect behavior - we could hope for a bug fix. But with a new intended behavior - broken be design, there is not much hope for a fix by Apple.

The same happened for the "R" shortcut for the Retouch tool. Two weeks ago I received a reply to my bug report that "Photos is functioning as designed". It included a link to the updated list of shortcuts. https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/photos-keyboard-shortcuts-on-mac-pht6e593 112/mac

Nope! I spent 2 hours this morning fiddling and tinkering around with no luck, so have just left things as described in my answer to Léonie further down. But do send Apple feedback about this, the more the merrier! www.apple.com/feedback

Regards, Ian.

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I hate this as well. Now you must hit the "return" key to have the function previously used by the space bar. I do not like this. Was looking to see if we could change this by a setting but I haven't found it yet.

Uhhg. I completely agree. MacOS has conditioned me to slap the spacebar to view objects, and this was an obvious, intuitive and consistent way to open/close photos.

My quantity of photos outnumbers my quantity of videos 30:1, so this change has made the spacebar 30x less useful (not to mention that the spacebar could previously be used to open/close videos as well).

Changing this behavior (without providing an option to restore the previous behavior) is offensive. I will not update to Mojave on my primary machine until an option is available.