PowerPhotos for Apple Photo Libraries Merge

Goodbye Aperture – Hello Apple Photos

The best thing for me about Aperture, is the facility to use the plug-ins from various other third-party applications. Third-party plug-ins from HDR application Photomatix, Intensify Pro, Tonality, Topaz Impression and Noiseless, to mention just a few. It is useful to have all your photos in one place. When you process photos in a different application via a plug-in, the image goes away and comes back to the same place as a copy. It does the round-trip automatically and you don’t have to worry about bringing in the changed photo you had to first of all export out in the first place. We don’t have that functionality yet in the new Apple Photos application, but I expect it will come at some point in time. It’s going to be necessary to make the jump from Aperture one of these days as it is no longer being updated or improved. We just need to be patient for the functionality of Photos App to catch up with what was available in either Aperture or iPhoto previously. In the meantime, we can look at a couple of applications to help us get better use out of the Apple Photos application. There are two such additions we can look at from Fat Cat Software – PowerPhotos and iPhoto Library Manager. I’ve already used a third-party application, PhotoSweeper, for finding duplicate photos which worked extremely well. Finding duplicates is also offered by PowerPhotos.

Analyse your libraries in Power Photos

Create and manage

With this application create and manage multiple libraries. This is extremely handy if you have a limit on the amount of space available on the iCloud photo storage. It also means you can archive off photos you don’t need to look at very often. It’s also makes it easy for you to organise your photos into categories or projects.

Find your photos

You don’t even have to have the Apple Photos application open in order to do a quick browse and search. Either search through a single library or find what you need from multiple libraries. You get a detailed list of your photos which includes a good presentation of the photo meta data. You have lists of photos showing the dates, keywords, descriptions and faces as well as one or two other things besides. From there you can reveal the photo you’re looking for either in Photos or directly in the Finder. Once you’ve found the photo you’re looking for, do the right click and send it off to Affinity Photoand do what you need to do with it.

Bringing it all together

You could have a number photo libraries either in Aperture or in iPhoto you need to bring into Apple Photos. With PowerPhotos you can automate your migration of these photo libraries into the new application.

PowerPhotos A Worthy Addition to Apple Photos

We have so many photos to take care of these days, due to us using our iPhones and even iPads to take photos as well as with our larger digital cameras. It’s necessary for us to have the best software to store and categorise our photos to make them easy to find and to work with. Apple Photos is not yet up to full strength, but it will be, given time. In the meantime we can make things better by using applications such as PowerPhotos. The application itself is not terribly expensive at $20 and seems a worthwhile addition to your photo management tools. It’s still going to be necessary to do a manual export out of Photos App and an import of the photo when you’ve dealt with it in applications such as Affinity Photo. It’s not going to be too difficult to use some automation on your Mac using applications such as Hazel, Keyboard Maestro and maybe even Automator or AppleScript to keep on top of the organisational process. With some work arounds it will be good to make use of the Apple Photos App to manage our photo libraries.