Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's look at creating and storing passwords in Safari.
The password functionality in Safari not only stores passwords but allows you to create
very strong randomly generated passwords.
You should use this functionality.
As an example let's create a new Twitter account.
I'm just going to create something temporarily.
Notice when I get to the password field it comes up and says Use Safari suggested password.
Now you should use this password.
It is a randomly generated password.
The only reason not to use one is if you use a third party program, like say OnePassword
or Last Pass which also will generate random passwords for you.
But you should never use a password that you think of in your head because it is not random
and it can be guessed by computer algorithms.
So you should always use a random one to keep things strong.
Of course always use a different one for different sites.
So this is going to be a unique new random password.
I'm going to accept it and use it to sign up for Twitter.
Now let's take a look in Safari in the Preferences.
If you click on passwords here you will see a list of all the sites where I have created
a password.
If I entered my own password in it would be here as well.
But the randomly generated one is going to be here.
It doesn't make any difference.
I can see the user name, the web site, the password.
I can select it and remove it if I wanted to clear that out which I would do, for example,
once I delete this Twitter account that I have created as just an example.
I can also click here to show these and it is going to ask me for my user account password.
The user account for my Mac here.
When I do so I can see the password there.
I can also control click at this point and I can copy the user name or the password.
So that's useful because sometimes you have to enter in a password for something that
is not Safari.
Like for instance I may download a Twitter app and I may want to then copy this password
rather than having to look at it on the screen and recreate it.
So I can copy it and it copies it to the buffer.
That is very handy.
You also have access to this password outside of Safari by using an app called Keychain
Access.
So I'm going to use the search menu there to search for Keychain Access.
You can see it is in the Application Utilities folder.
I'm going to launch that and click on the Passwords category here.
I'm going to do a search for Twitter and you can see there it is.
The one I just created.
I can double click it there and I can see information about it including the ability
to show a password here.
Now here it what happens when I go to sign into Twitter.
I've signed out.
I'm going to click on the sign in button here.
You can see it fills in my ID and my password.
You can see it has this yellow background here showing that autofill has filled this
in.
So now I can log in.
That's all there is to it.
It is automatically filled in.
You don't have to do anything else.
Every once in a while I notice a site that sometimes you have to jump to the actual field
for it to fill in.
Sometimes it prompts you.
But a lot of times it just appears here like this.
So now I can log in and I didn't have to type my password.
What happens if I change my password?
Let's go to Settings here in Twitter again and I'm going to go to Password.
You can see it automatically fills in my current password.
Safari does that for me.
I'm going to create a new password.
You can see that as soon as I select that field it is going to suggest a new password.
So I'm going to use that.
It is smart enough also to fill it in in the second field, the verify field, as well.
So now I can save the changes on this.
You can see here I had a little bit of trouble because this web page Twitter, which is not
associated with Apple, didn't recognize that those fields had been filled in.
So just by tabbing between them I was able to activate the Save Changes button.
You can see also that Twitter rated my password as very strong, as it should.
Now I get a little field here, a prompt, to Update Password.
Of course I do want to do that.
So now the new password is in Safari saved.
You can see that's the new one created.
So it is always going to kind of automatically update.
Now here is perhaps the best part of the entire thing.
If I go to System Preferences and I go to iCloud.
I will see my iCloud account settings and if I scroll down I will see one of the settings
here as Keychain and I've selected it.
So this is iCloud Keychain.
This means that iCloud is going to be used to sync my Keychain between my devices.
So my iPhone, my iPad, and my other Mac are all going to share the same Keychain.
They are going to sync which means the next time I try to log onto Twitter on one of those
devices I'll find that those password fields are already filled in.
This is especially great on the iPhone, say, where it is kind of hard to type those in
especially if it is a long strong password like this one.
So I've created this Twitter account, I've saved the password to the iCloud keychain
and now I can log onto Twitter across all my devices and it is secure because the Keychain
file is encrypted across those devices.
If you don't have access to my iCloud account then you can't get access to the data inside
the Keychain.
One more thing I want to point out.
What if you need to update this password here.
In Safari you can't update the password.
You can copy it.
But you can't update it in the Preferences here.
So say you have updated your Twitter password on another device and it wasn't connected
to your iCloud keychain account.
How can you update it so that Safari knows the new password?
Well one way to do that is to go and sign in again and you can just manually type the
new password and it will then update.
Another thing that you can do is, of course, you can go to Keychain Access and you can
edit in there.
So when I select this you can see that I can actually edit this here if I want.