Do you have a lot of apps on your iPhone? Do you find it difficult to locate the one you need? By grouping related apps into folders you can find your apps more easily. By setting up folders you can reduce the number of screens that you have to flip through to locate your apps. For example, the iPhone can typically display 36 apps on two screens. I have 90 apps on my iPhone, and they fill less than 2 screens.

You might want to create a folder to store apps that you rarely use. Apple doesn’t allow you to remove the core apps they install on the phone. It’s likely that you don’t use all of these apps, so you could create a folder to store these apps together.

Here are instructions on how to create folders on your iPhone or iPad:

Tap and hold the icon of any one app on your device. After a couple of seconds all of the icons on your iPhone or iPad will start to jiggle side-to-side.

Tap and drag the icon of one app on top of the icon of a second, related app, then release the first app’s icon. (You need to have just the right touch. Otherwise, your iPhone or iPad will think that you’re just re-arranging your apps and it’ll just move the second app to the left or right.)

This first app’s icon will fall onto the second app’s icon and a folder will automatically be created. In the image below you can see that I’ve dragged the KOMO News app onto the SeattleCrime app. My iPhone automatically created a folder and proposed a folder name of News. I can either accept this name or tap on the name to edit it.

That’s it! You’ve created a folder. Press the Home button on the lower section of the iPhone’s face to stop the icon jiggling and indicate that you’re done organizing apps into folders.

You’ll now see the folder icon, which is a square with teeny-tiny icons of the apps that it contains inside the square. The image to the right shows the many folders that I’ve created on my iPhone.

It’s useful to know that a folder can hold a maximum of 12 apps. A folder can not be put inside of another folder.

Chances are good that you’ll want to add many apps to a given folder or create many folders all at once. If this is the case, after you’ve dragged one app icon onto another to create the folder, you can simply tap anywhere outside the folder to return to viewing all of your apps. At this point, you can then drag additional apps into the folder you created. You could also drag another app on top of yet another app to create a second folder. You get the idea.

At some point, you’ll want to remove an app from a folder. Guess how you do it? You tap on the folder’s icon, it opens, then tap and hold on any of the app icons to get them to jiggle. Then, simply drag the app’s icon out of the folder. You’ll see an animation of the app icon jumping out of the folder and back onto the iPhone’s main screen. When you remove the last app from a folder, the folder automatically deletes itself.

I’m surprised how often I’m asked how to remove an app from an iPhone or iPad. Consequently, I decided to write this short tech tip since there are, no doubt, many other people out there wondering the same thing.

There are numerous ways to remove an app, but here’s one simple method:

Tap and hold on the icon of the app that you want to remove. After a couple of seconds all the icons on your iPhone or iPad will start to jiggle side-to-side.

Tap the X that appears in the upper-left corner of the app. The X is a delete button. It will remove the app from your iPhone or iPad.

For example, let’s imagine that I want to remove the app named Navigon from my iPhone. I would press my finger on the Navigon app (see picture below) icon and hold it there. After a second or so, all icons on my iPhone start to jiggle. I can then tap the X button to remove Navigon.

Note: This technique only works for third-party apps that you’ve added to your iPhone or iPad. Apple doesn’t let you remove the core set of apps that come with the iPhone or iPad. If there are some Apple-provided apps which you don’t use often, the best you can do is to put these apps into a folder. What? You don’t know how to create a folder for your apps? I guess that’ll be next week’s Tech Tip.

Update: A reader asked how to remove an iPhone or iPad app when it’s listed in iTunes on your Mac. Here are two methods. The first method is remove the app from your iPhone or iPad as described above. Then, sync your iPhone or iPad to your Mac by connecting the USB sync cable to connect the two devices. As long as app synching is enabled the app will be removed from your Mac since you deleted it from the iPhone or iPad.

If this first method doesn’t work, here’s another option. Open iTunes, on the left-hand list click on Apps. Select the app you want to delete by clicking on it. Go to the Edit menu and select Delete. Click the “Move to Trash” button to fully remove the app from your Mac.

Do you have duplicate or triplicate photos in your iPhoto Library? I recommend using Duplicate Annihilator to remove them.  The developer’s web site has a short movie that shows you how to use the program. It is reasonably priced at $8 for a single license or $13 if you want a Family Pack which lets you install it on as many as 5 Macs. While I trust Duplicate Annihilator, you should always make sure that you have a complete backup of your iPhoto Library before you use Duplicate Annihilator. Its default settings will not delete any photos from your iPhoto Library. Instead, it assigns the word duplicate as a comment for each duplicate photo that it identifies. By default, it uses an MD5 checksum to compare photos. This is a very effective and accurate way to compare digital fingerprints of two files to see if they are the same. Duplicate Annihilator can take several hours to scan a library with tens of thousands of photos, so be prepared for this. It displays some status indicators such as a running total of duplicates found, how many photos it has scanned, how many photos remain to be scanned and estimates how much longer the scan will take. Once the scan is complete, you can enter the word duplicate in iPhoto’s search field to locate all of the duplicates. Then you can go to the Edit menu and choose Select All to select the duplicate photos, then press the Delete key on your keyboard to put these photos into iPhotos’ Trash. Then you would need to empty iPhoto’s trash to completely delete the photos.

Important Note: Before I delete the duplicates, I like to do some random double-checking. After I’ve used iPhoto’s search feature to locate the duplicates, I write down the date of a handful of the photos. Then I clear out the search field so I can see all of my photos. After that I locate these selected photos by date to verify the photos are, indeed, duplicated. Finally, I repeat the search to locate all duplicates and delete them.

Check out Duplicate Annihilator. It can save you a lot of time when you need to eliminate duplicates in iPhoto on your Mac.

Have you ended up with duplicate songs in iTunes that you want to remove? iTunes has a built-in “Display Duplicate” feature which can be helpful, but I prefer to use the slightly hidden “Display Exact Duplicates” feature instead. How’s are instructions on its use:

• Open iTunes.
• Hold down the Option key, then click on the File menu and select “Display Exact Duplicates”. (If you don’t hold down the option key you’ll instead see “Display Duplicates.”)
• iTunes will do a search and do its best to display pairs of songs which are exact duplicates of each other. This feature doesn’t work perfectly but it’s pretty good.
• Then to actually get rid of the duplicates you can hold down the Command key (aka Apple key) and click on each of the songs that you want to delete.
• Finally, press the Delete key.
• You’ll be asked if you really want to remove the song. Click the Remove button.
• Finally, you’ll be asked if your want to move the song file to Trash or keep it in the iTunes Media folder. You could do either but to really get rid of the file you should put it in the Trash.

Note: There is a reason why I don’t like to use  iTunes’ built-in “Display Duplicates” feature. In a nutshell, it doesn’t seem to be very effective. I think it only compares the song’s Name and Artist. There are times when one might want two copies of the same song by the same artist. For example, one might have two versions of the same song — one from the original album release and a second version from a live concert album or a greatest hits album.

If you find that iTunes’ “Display Exact Duplicates” is not adequate for your needs then I’ll direct you to two third-party products. Acertant’s Tunes Ranger and SuperSync. I’ve used Tunes Ranger to merge multiple iTunes Libraries while retaining playlists. I haven’t used SuperSync. Both products indicate that they’ll help to identify and remove duplicates.

Did you know that Apple’s Mail application automatically builds a list of all recipients to whom you’ve sent email? I think it’s very useful to review this list a few times each year. By reviewing this list you can easily add useful email addresses to your Address Book and delete outdated email addresses or ones that contain typos.

Before we review this list, it’s important to understand how it is used by Mail. When you are creating a new email message and you begin to type a person’s name or email address in the To: field, you’re typically presented with a list of email addresses which match the letters that you’ve typed. This list of email addresses is a composite of email addresses from your Address Book as well as addresses listed in your Previous Recipients list.

If you ever made a typo in an email address and then sent the email message, this incorrect email address was likely added to your Previous Recipient list. By reviewing this list you can remove such undesirable email addresses.

To view your Previous Recipient list, open Mail, click on the Window menu and select Previous Recipient. You can search this list using the search field in the upper right corner. You can also sort this list by any of the columns listed: Name, Email, or Last Used. You can also sort by the left-hand most column which is not named. This column indicates if the email address is saved in your Address Book. If it is then you’ll see an icon which resembles a Rolodex card. If the address is not in your Address Book, this space will be blank. I like to sort by this column to find common recipients whose email addresses I want in my Address Book. I then select them and use the Add to Address Book button. If you don’t typically add people to your Address Book, this can be a fast way to add a whole lot of people to your Address Book.

In order to remove an email address containing a typo, I often use the search field to locate it. Then I’ll click on the address to select it and use the Remove From List button.

I like to sort the list by the Last Used date. I review the oldest addresses listed and if I don’t recognize them then I select one or more and remove them from the list too.

For years, SanDisk’s Cruzer USB flash drives have been partitioned into two parts. One part is named U3 and contains some Windows-only software that can be used to protect files stored on the other partition. This software is useless to Mac users and the U3 partition just becomes an annoyance. So, many people have wondered how they can delete this U3 partition. Until recently one needed to download and use a Windows-only application made by Cruzer. Finally, in Jan 2010, Cruzer released a Mac application which can be used to get rid of the U3 partition.

You can download the application here.

Once it’s downloaded you can open it and start its installation. Be aware that installation will require you to restart your Mac.

After the restart you’ll find several applications in a folder named “SanDisk Cruzer” in your /Applications/Utilities folder.

Open up the application named “LaunchPad Removal Utility for Mac” and follow the on-screen instructions. I found one part of the instructions confusing. It asks if you want to backup the data. I thought it was referring to the data on the other partition, but that is apparently not the case. I figured out that it was only referring to the data on the U3 partition, not the data on the main partition where you put your files. So, I told the application to go ahead and remove the partition without backing up data. I waited 30 seconds and it finished the process successfully and all of my data on the main partition was still intact.

Even though I told you that the application won’t erase your data on the USB flash drive I still recommend that you backup the data on the USB flash drive just in case something goes wrong. I don’t want you to lose any of your data.