Power Up Apple Photos with PowerPhotos (Sponsor)

PowerPhotos is the year-end sponsor at MacSparky. While Apple continues to make incremental progress with Photos, the power tools are forever absent.

PowerPhotos is the app you need to manage your extensive photo library. With PowerPhotos, you can manage images across multiple libraries. Need to merge libraries? It does that. Need to split images into a separate library? It does that too. I use PowerPhotos to remove duplicates. Whatever your Photos challenge, PowerPhotos can help you get your photo collection back in order.

With the recent release of version 1.9, PowerPhotos supports macOS Big Sur and runs natively on Apple Silicon. It also added a new feature, making it possible to copy RAW+JPG pairs as a single item, making everything all that much easier.
PowerPhotos gives Apple Photos the tools it needs, but Apple didn’t provide. With PowerPhotos, you can work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. You can also split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your photos without even opening up Photos itself, a multi-library search feature, and more.

PowerPhotos has all those tools you’d want for Apple Photos, but Apple will never add. The end of the year is a great time to look at and manage your photo library. Why not do that with PowerPhotos this year? If you’re a Mac veteran, you may recall an app from the iPhoto days called iPhoto Library Manager that gave you a similar set of tools. PowerPhotos is by the same developer, and it’s just as reliable.

MacSparky readers can use the coupon code MACSPARKY20 to save 20% off a purchase of PowerPhotos. Go check out PowerPhotos today.

PowerPhotos 1.7 Update

I'm hard at work on the new Photos Field Guide but wanted to share one bit that I'll be covering concerning PowerPhotos. This Mac app solves a bunch of problems for Apple Photos power users. They recently released an update to version 1.7 that adds Catalina support and adds some new features, my favorite of which is the ability to preserve reversible edits when copying photos between libraries. Also, loading libraries into PowerPhotos is now much faster.

This is a free update to previous owners. If you find yourself banging your head into Apple Photos’ limitations, particularly concerning library management, you'll want to check out PowerPhotos.

PowerPhotos 1.6

If you find yourself banging your head against Apple’s Photos app limitations, you may want to check out the latest version of PowerPhotos. Version 1.6 has several new features to help you get your photo library in order. Because PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photos libraries, now when you copy or merge Live Photos between libraries, both the photo and video components will be preserved. Also, your photos’ original filename will be kept so that when you copy photos that have been edited in the Photos app, they won’t be imported into the destination library with its unhelpful modified name (e.g. “IMG_0001.JPG” instead of “fullsizeoutput_123.jpeg”).

The photo browser’s got a few helpful tweaks. Now you can heart you favorite photos with a heart icon in grid view. You can also see how long a movie is in grid view. And if you haven’t titled your photo, its filename will now be displayed underneath the photo.

If you’re an existing user, the update is free. If you’re interested in PowerPhotos, there’s a free version you can try, but if you want to use the advanced features such as copying photos, merging libraries, and removing duplicate photos, you can purchase a license for $29.95.