Space bar won't open photos in Mojave

Also, once I'm signed in, I'm not able to mark any posts as Helpful. I thought maybe because I'd already marked too MANY as helpful, and that I was being limited as to how often I could "vote" on a given thread.

Thank you Sir!!

It was "hold Fn whilst pressing the spacebar" that did the trick :-)
That allowed me to put a spacebar in the shortcut field.

There are limits on the number of "Helpful" and "solved" per discussion.

• The original poster can award one "Solved" and two "Helpful" marks per discussion.
• Any other forum member can award twice a "Helpful" per discussion.

Thank you all for your kind remarks. I have been pretty quiet, but I see all the postings.

What a useless explanation of a UX Bug.

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.

Sorry Leonie and thank you for your update.

i just read that. Didnt know Apple updated their description and manifesting this UX Fail.
[Edited by Host]

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

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.

I went to the Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts > Added Photos. For Menu Title I entered "Open Viewer" and for the keyboard shortcut I pressed Fn with Space.

At the same time, I followed the procedure for closing picture preview.

Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts > Added Photos. For Menu Title I entered "Close Viewer" and for the keyboard shortcut I pressed Fn with Space.

Thats great except there seems to be something preventing me from using the same shortcut to open and close. The open with spacebar works fine then gives me an error chime when pressing spacebar to close. Sure would be great if Apple would ruin functionality with new releases ....

Thank you, Eric. It worked for me with Photos! Since it's now December and you posted this in October, I'm guessing Apple heard the cry for help :-)

Same here, Bell86! Before updating to Mojave 10.14.2 the shortcut workaround posted by Eric in Boca worked fine on my iMac, but now it´s only possible to have a shortcut to open or to close, not both! **** nuisance!

Hi Eric in Boca! Before updating to Mojave 10.14.2 your shortcut workaround worked great on my iMac, but now it´s only possible to have a shortcut to open or to close, not both! **** nuisance!

😠 You're right, Ian. Now only the "Open" shortcut is working for me. "Close" is still defined, but it does no longer work. And the "Return" key is no disabled as well.