Over the last decade, I’ve heard people sing the praises of the app PowerPhotos from FatCat Software. I’d take a look at it, but find the vast capabilities somewhat intimidating. When J.F. Brissette suggested I consider making a ScreenCastsONLINE video tutorial on PowerPhotos, I figured this was the best way to learn the tool once and for all. I’m really glad I took on the challenge. I guess I’m burying the lede and not telling you what PowerPhotos is for. Think of PowerPhotos as extending Apple Photos on Mac by providing either things Apple Photos doesn’t do, or doing a better job at some things Photos does not do well.
PowerPhotos can merge Photos libraries, split libraries, create new libraries, and help you reorganize albums and folders more elegantly. While Apple Photos has the ability to merge duplicates, how it does that is opaque, and you have to trust it will do what you want. PowerPhotos lets you be very granular on how it merges duplicates, so you keep the version you want. I think my favorite part of working with PowerPhotos is how it lets you very quickly modify metadata like titles, captions, and tags, and even do bulk modifications of metadata.
If you’re a ScreenCastsONLINE subscriber already, I think you’ll get a lot out of my latest tutorial on PowerPhotos. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can get a free 7-day trial of the service and watch all of the current back catalog. Don’t be intimidated by how feature-rich PowerPhotos is; conquer it by learning from ScreenCastsONLINE. I know that sounds like AI wrote it, but I actually believe this is the best way to learn tools on Apple devices.
I just finished watching this tutorial. It is worth my entire subscription to ScreenCastsOnline.
The best part is the section on metadata. I’ve been struggling with Titles vs. Captions for over 10 years. Shame on Apple for making it so different between macOS and iOS. Titles are front and center in macOS but not even visible in iOS. For a decade.
But maybe now there is a workaround.
PowerPhotos allows you to embed your existing captions in your titles in a batch fashion! Read that again. I’ve owned it forever, but did not know this.
The excellent tutorial will show you how to do this.
My photos library is north of 90000 photos. It won’t be perfect, but I know have the means and inspiration to clean it up a bit. Furthermore, it won’t be an ergonomic nightmare. And it won’t take forever.
The tutorial also made me think about a local backup strategy for photos. And PowerPhotos can help there too.
Thanks, Paul! I’m so glad you learned a lot in the tutorial. It’s certainly a very powerful tool and fills in those annoying gaps in Photos. It was a hard tool to teach because it’s SO capable. I’m not surprised you didn’t know every single feature. It’s one of the reasons I took this one on. I couldn’t get myself to learn all it could do without committing to teaching it.