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Now let’s take a look at some of the functionality Mac photo apps provide: For starters, you need software that can import and organize your digital photos.
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If you're looking for an open-source, free but powerful option, check out RawTherapee. At the enthusiast level, we have ACDSee Ultimate, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Lightroom, CyberLink PhotoDirector, Corel PaintShop Pro, Serif Affinity Photo, and Skylum Luminar.
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The online-only Google Photos is another entry-level option. After all, it comes free with your computer and ties in snugly with photos shot on iPhones. As you might expect, Apple Photos is the prime example of beginner photo software, despite its impressive power. Photo software can be categorized either by its target audience level-beginner, enthusiast, or advanced-or by function. What Types of Mac Photo Software Are There? Software that hasn't been rebuilt for the new platform can still run via Apple's Rosetta 2 translation engine, sometimes with a moderate performance hit. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security SoftwareĪ note for people who have or are considering buying an Apple Silicon-based Mac: Most of the software is not yet updated to run natively on this new hardware, but a few heavy hitters have, including Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom, and, of course, Apple Photos.
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And, it can seamlessly migrate old iPhoto or Aperture libraries and turn them into new Photos libraries.įinally, if you’re running an older version of macOS and using iPhoto, Fatcat Software also offers PowerPhotos predecessor, iPhoto Library Manager ($29.99), but here’s a nice touch: If you buy either one, you get a license for the other at no additional cost. Finding duplicates with PowerPhotos is easy and it works!īut wait-there’s more! It’s also got its own image browser, so you can search for photos in multiple libraries without even opening the Photos app. I’ve tried many apps that claim to find duplicate photos, but none do it as well or as easily as PowerPhotos. Which brings me to the second great feature: Find Duplicate Photos. It took all night but PowerPhotos merged my three libraries into one!
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While everything looked good and worked flawlessly, I noticed I had failed to enable Eliminate Duplicates While Merging, so I ended up with a lot of duplicate photos in my monolithic, all-encompassing library. It took all night, but the next day all 65,000 photos and videos were in one library. While a single monolithic library may slow down the Photos app more than three smaller ones, I still wanted everything in one place. The first is merging multiple Photos libraries into one. Two features make PowerPhotos a must-have, at least for me. It works in conjunction with the macOS Photos app, adding tools that help you manage and organize your photo collection, create and manage multiple libraries, and copy photos and albums from library to library while retaining their metadata, including keywords, descriptions, titles, dates, and favorite status. PowerPhotos ($29.99) was just what I needed. Then I remembered hearing Dave Hamilton mention PowerPhotos on his Mac Geek Gab podcast, raving that it offered the tools that should have been built into the Photos app… PowerPhotos to the Rescue! But I was afraid I might the ability to revert modified files to their original state, not to mention all of my carefully curated albums, star ratings, keywords, metadata, and such. I suppose if I were a more patient person, I could have exported the contents of the two archival libraries and imported them into the current one. You have to close the current library to open a different one, so there was no easy way to merge their contents. The bad news was, as I mentioned, Photos restricts you to a single library at a time. That way I’d only need to look in one place for any of my 62,000 photos and 3,000 videos. With larger and cheaper hard drives now plentiful (for backups), I decided I wanted to merge all of my photos from the three libraries back into a single Photos library. I Want My Single Monolithic Library Back!
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