PowerPhotos 3 review: Time-saving Apple Photos tool for power users on the Mac

Price When Reviewed

$39.95 new license | $19.95 upgrade from iPLM/PowerPhotos 1/2

Best Prices Today: PowerPhotos 3

Since its first appearance in 2015, PowerPhotos continues to offer features Apple doesn’t provide in Photos for macOS, making PowerPhotos a must-have for people who want to get the most from Apple’s app. Photos does improve with every release, but developer Brian Webster continues to update PowerPhotos to make up for what’s missing, improving past features and adding more refinements. Version 3 brings a couple of key upgrades as well as big bumps in performance.

The app’s update, priced at $39.95 for new users, includes new and improved capabilities such as bulk editing metadata (like titles and keywords), using templating to apply incremented counters and other placeholders to groups of media, searching and de-duplicating across multiple Photos libraries, and manipulating media and albums within the app as if you were using Photos. Advanced search options exceed Photos’ smart folder options

Fills a gap in Photos that Apple still hasn’t bridged

Consider Apple’s Photos as a basic package on one end of the media management spectrum and Adobe’s current Lightroom (in two versions) as an advanced option at the other end. (Apple’s Aperture used to compete there.) Photos offers library organization and, with many improvements over the years, photo editing; Lightroom has both, with far more sophisticated ways to modify and shape images, along with more flexibility in how media is organized and stored.

For users who don’t need all the advanced features of Lightroom and like the friendliness and deep Apple operating system integration, PowerPhotos 3 provides an affordable set of extras. It works natively with Apple Photos Library format, so you don’t give up what you like within Photos. PowerPhotos has no image-editing tools, leaving that territory to Apple and third-party standalone apps.

PowerPhotos fills in Photos’ gaps by letting you work with and around libraries better than Photos works with a single one. Since its launch, PowerPhotos has been the only way to merge libraries and drag-and-drop media from one library to another. If you maintain or want to create multiple Photos libraries to handle your collections or break up a massive library into smaller pieces, PowerPhotos remains the only tool that provides the management features you need.

Version 2 added powerful de-duplication so you could remove identical or near-identical images with many options to control how close a match you made, reducing storage use and confusion over which image you wanted. Version 3 extends de-dupe across all the libraries you select.

The new version adds to the previous ability to copy albums and media from one library to another the option to move albums or media instead. To prevent media losses while the move is underway, PowerPhotos uses the gold standard of first copying the items to the other library before deleting them from the original.

A more powerful search and bulk information editing

The keystone features of PowerPhotos 3 are an advanced set of search options and the addition of multi-item (or “bulk”) metadata editing, which lets you change the title or caption associated with your images or photos using tokens (like Year, Height in pixels, or Place Name).

You will recognize the search feature setup from the way Apple structures smart folders, albums, and Finder Spotlight searches. You can set multiple criteria, nest them, and choose whether to make each nested set of criteria all required (like “larger than 1 MB and taken in Italy”) or allow just one to match (like “in the ‘Italy’ album or ‘France’ album or ‘Liechtenstein’ album”). Criteria for these searches include several that aren’t available in Photos, such as file size or the height or width of a photo.

Searches can be saved so you can reuse them later. You can also opt to search a single Photos library or across multiple libraries, further leveraging the use of dividing your media among libraries without making it harder to find what you want.

The option to bulk edit metadata should not be underestimated. Apple’s Photos offers the Inspector pane, which lets you set title, keywords, and other parameters for a set of images and photos (or one at a time). However, Apple’s tool lacks tokens, which can stand in when renaming the title or reformulating the caption. Even more robustly, PowerPhotos 3 includes a Counter token, which automatically increments by one from the first selected photo or video in your set. (I have previously turned to A Better Finder Attributes for this.)

You can use this bulk editing to turn a bunch of files named IMG_1733 with no captions into ones titled with a piece of text, like “Trip to California,” followed by the date or time in any arrangement you like, and even the place name. For captions, you could include a lot of extra detail useful when reviewing photos, including the exact time in seconds or the height and width in pixels. Changes are previewed in the thumbnail view.

The bulk editor includes keyword editing, allowing you to select from a list of all keywords in the library or add your own. The developer also updated the app so that all metadata work can be done without your hands leaving the keyboard.

More minor updates that still prove useful include a more full-featured photo browser and photo viewer within the app. Nearly all operations you can perform in Photos, like managing albums and moving media, can now be done inside PowerPhotos. A new photo viewer lets you see images within the app instead of using macOS’s Quick Look window. The app has had noticeable improvements in speed with loading libraries and viewing images.

Should you buy PowerPhotos 3?

If you are stymied by limitations in Photos, don’t waste a second before getting PowerPhotos. It’s an app that complements Photos in basic and advanced ways, unlocking otherwise unavailable power without sacrificing compatibility with Apple’s library format.