10 Mac Password App Tips

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten tips for using the Passwords App on your Mac. 

So we have had the Passwords App on our Mac and our iPhones and iPads for quite a while now. Here are some additional tips that you may not know about. I'm going to launch the Passwords App and then Authenticate. Inside the Passwords App, of course, you'll see a list of all of the passwords here and you'll see some buttons here to the left. You probably have All selected, so you can see all of your passwords. You can search for them here or just scroll through them. 

But, also remember to pay attention to the Button here marked Security. Go to that and then check to see what's listed. This is going to list any passwords that are too simple. They are to easy to guess. You should work to change them. So, for instance, this one right here tells me that the password is just too simple of a password. Every website does it a little differently on how you change passwords. So go to the site, change the password, and then in doing so it should update the password you have stored here. Don't get overwhelmed by this list. It's typical to have dozens of things here. Some of them are as simple as an easily guessed password. Some may say that it is a reused password, in other words a password used in more than one location. You should definitely avoid those! Other times you'll see compromised passwords. 

Deal with the compromised passwords first. That means there is has been a data breech with that website and your password is just out there. So you want to login to that site and change your password. But don't get overwhelmed by this list. Take care of the compromised passwords first and then work over the course of the day, or even over many days, to update any passwords that are too weak or are being reused. 

Now while it is nice to have this entire app here so that you can view all your passwords sometimes you just quickly want to get to a password. You can do that without even launching the Passwords App. So in the Passwords App go to Passwords Settings and look for Show Passwords in Menu Bar. Turn that On. It's going to add this Menu Bar item here. So now we can Quit the Passwords App but that Menu Bar button is still there. You can click on it, authenticate, I'll do that with Touch ID here or you can do it with your password, and you can Search through your passwords right in this little handy Menu Bar dropdown menu instead of having to launch the app itself. 

Now you can use the Passwords App for more than just strictly passwords. If you want to store some secure information you can do it. Just create a new entry. I'll do that with the Plus Button here and give it a title. So, for instance, let's say you have a padlock to the gate in your yard, or something like that. You can assign a title like that. Then go to the Password Field here, click on that and select Choose My Own Password. So you can enter in something like a security code or a ATM pin. Something like that there if you like. Or, you can leave this blank here and go to the Notes Section and put information there. So you can just put whatever you want here on multiple lines. Save It. It will let you save it here with just any information you've got in there. It doesn't require that you have a password or a website or anything. The Title and something in the Password Field or a Title and something in the Note Field will work just fine. 

Now here's something I talked about in a recent video and was surprised that people didn't know about this. You know when you've got two-factor codes. Sometimes those come from an app. A lot of people use something like Google Authenticator or another password's app to generate those two-factor codes. They don't realize that this is a feature of the Passwords App as well. So, for instance, let's set one up here. I'm going to go to this demo Google account here and it doesn't have a two-factor code associated with it. So it's going to give me this button here, Setup Code. But also if I Edit here you'll see Code None and I can Setup Code. I can click there and it is going to ask for a Setup Key or I can choose  a QR code image. So this is a Google account. I'm going to go to the Security and Sign-in Section of that Google Account where you would setup two-factor verification. I'm going to click on it right here and this allows me to setup two-factor authentication and you can see I can do that right here using an Authenticator App. But it doesn't have to be a Google authenticator or some other app. You can just use the Passwords App for this. I'm going to go into it here. I'm going to set it up and you can see it's going to give me a QR code which is kind of hard to scan in the code on your screen with the camera that's about your screen. But they know that. That's why there's this Can't Scan It button. Click that and you can see here it gives you this key. I'm going to select this Key and copy it. I'm going to switch back to the Passwords App here and I'm going to setup the code for this account. I'm going to paste it in and say Use The Setup Key. You can see now it shows that there is a verification code associated with this and I see Code right up here. It gives me the Code. I don't have to click anything special to get to it. So I can take this Code here and confirm here on the site. It does this to make sure. As a matter of fact I don't even need to type it in. You can see how the Passwords App right away is hooked into this and it is saying, yeah use this verification code. So it is going to do that and you can see it matches the one that is here. Now that it has set it up it's all set and ready to go for this account. 

Other websites do it in different ways but they always provide a security key of some kind. It looks like a bunch of random letters for you to Copy and Paste in situations like this. 

Another handy feature of the Passwords App is the ability to view the history of changes. This is particularly useful when you change the password but you're not fully confident that the website change actually occurred. So you want to save the old password. I used to always put these in Notes. But you don't have to do that anymore because now you can go to an entry, like this here, and then click on View History. It will only appear there if there is actually a history. Here you can see that the password was changed recently and you can go back and look at the previous password. 

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Another cool thing you can do with the Passwords App is create Shared Group. So, go to File and select New Shared Group. You can create a group that includes other people and just add them or you can create a family group for your family. This way you can share passwords. Very useful for things like Streaming Services  where, say, you and your spouse may both need to occasionally login from time to time. You can both know what the password is and when it changes it updates for the both of you. 

So normally when you select an item in passwords here it shows you your username and, of course, the password. But some are different. For instance if I go here I can see it says instead of username, Apple Account. What this means is that when I signed up for this account instead of providing an email address I simply hit the Continue with Apple Button. That created a private email address. A one-off email address associated just with that account so that I could login to that site without it knowing my actual email address. So if you use the Continue With or Sign-in with Apple Button to easily create accounts, note that you'll see them listed here as Apple Accounts. It will show you the Apple Account name and the email address associated with it. No password is provided because it's simply going to use Apple System to authenticate that you are you and pass that to the website or App instead of actually having a password. But it could be really useful especially if you're trying to get back into a website that you know you signed up for and your email address isn't working because it can't find the account, look it up in the Passwords App and you may find that you used that Sign-in or Continue With Apple Button to create the account originally. So you don't actually have an email address and password pair for that account. You're going to use that Apple Button once again to sign back in. 

Now if you have All selected here on the left you would imagine it lists all of your passwords. But it doesn't. It's going to leave out one specific type. That's your WiFi password. They are going to be listed under here instead. So you won't find them if you're looking at All. If you select WiFi you won't find all your regular passwords. You'll just find the WiFi passwords. This list is probably going to be long because anytime you've logged into a public WiFi System or at a hotel or a restaurant, cafe, anywhere, it is going to record that. You could be doing that on your iPhone and it is sharing it with the rest of your devices. So you're going to see a lot of old stuff here. It doesn't really hurt to keep them around but you can clean it up every once in a while if you like. But it is also handy to be able to Share the password with somebody else. So, if you wanted to Share the password you could just Select it here and then you could see the password and you can even click it and it will copy. Or you can click Show and it will bring up a QR code on your Mac Screen and they can use their camera on their phone to get the password very easily. There is no way to save this but you can always take a screenshot of it, say, if this is for your Home Network and use that to print out a sign that say goes by the network equipment for quests to be able to use. 

Sometimes you're looking for a password and you search for it and can't find it because the term that you think of when you think of that site or service isn't actually part of their domain name or isn't part of the account. You can kind of customize how search works in the Passwords App by using the Notes. So, for instance, if I go into this password entry here, Edit, and then go down to Notes and type in just something that I may associate with this site here, then that will show up when I search, even though that is not the name of the website or the app.

Here's one final tip. If you've been holding off using Apple's Passwords App because you don't use Safari as your browser, note that you don't have to. There are actually browser extensions for the Passwords App in the most popular browsers. You can actually get them right here from inside the Passwords App. Just go to Passwords and look for Get Browser Extension. It's going to bring up this list here that includes Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.