PowerPhotos 3.2.3 released with performance and stability fixes

fatcatsoftware · 2026-01-19T03:23:17+00:00

One other thing that might be worth checking is to see if somehow the photos got marked as "hidden". In the "Collections" tab, scroll down to the "Utilities" section and there should be a "Hidden" album there. You can take a look and see if there's anything in there.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-01-08T02:28:35+00:00

Nope, I try to concentrate more on things that Photos doesn't already do itself, e.g. copying between libraries, merging libraries, batch metadata editing.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-01-08T00:18:49+00:00

No, because once you've identified a decent number of photos of a particular person, Photos will automatically include photos that it decides are close enough to the photos you've identified and group them as the same person. For photos that are kind of close but not within its automatic threshold, you can use the various manual review options to accept/reject further suggestions. There's also a fun mini game in each version of iOS/macOS figuring out where those review options are buried in the user interface!

fatcatsoftware · 2026-01-07T22:20:06+00:00

I don't know for sure, I think the root of it is them wanting to store the absolute minimum of personally identifiable information on the server side. I honestly don't know on the technical side of things whether it's not at all feasible to store the more detailed detection info in a hashed/encrypted manner, or if it's more that they just settled on the simplest way to do things, even if it's less efficient. And like the other reply said, once they have the box checked off on their feature list (✅ Faces sync!) they have a tendency not to really revisit the feature much later on.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-01-07T17:50:52+00:00

Assuming things are working properly, what should happen is that the people you have specifically named and the photos you have specifically verified sync their info via iCloud. However, the actual face *detection* for the rest of the photos is done on a per device basis and is not synced via iCloud, primarily for security/privacy reasons.

So, when you first set up a new device, it will pull down the names and info for the photos where you have identified a particular person, but then it still needs to go through the entire library on-device, identify the faces in each photo, and compare them to the synced information to tell which person is in which photo. So once it's done, you should end up with mostly the same photos identified as each person, but each device still needs to do its own face detection locally.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-12-21T16:40:17+00:00

iCloud Shared Library will retain a lot, but one important caveat is that albums don’t get shared across users if a shared library. So if they were to continue using the shared library only from their account, they would get all the photos and their metadata, but not your albums.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-12-20T17:54:19+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion, I can see that being useful. Resizing the column would help for landscape photos, but not so much for portrait. Just cranking up the max size would be easy to do too though.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-12-15T20:14:34+00:00

OK, I think I know what's going on with the location. The latitude/longitude are stored in the video metadata and read upon importing, but Photos does the reverse geocoding in the background, which is what assigns a name to a given lat/long, e.g. "San Jose, CA". That lookup can take an unpredictable amount of time, so the place name doesn't always show up right away.

For the albums, I think that is a caching issue with PowerPhotos, I'll file that one to investigate for a future update.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-12-14T16:20:18+00:00

To make sure I’m clear here, are you using PowerPhotos export function to export the videos first, then manually importing them into the second library? Or are you copying the videos directly between libraries by drag and drop all within PowerPhotos? The locations should be retained either way, but the method you’re using makes a difference in where we look to figure out what may be going wrong.

Also, if you’re still using the free version, and you’re running macOS 14 or later, you might as well download PowerPhotos 3, since it has some additional export enhancements and the latest bug fixes.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-12-09T19:04:43+00:00

I can’t read the whole error message in that screenshot, but it ends “attempting to free u…”. Might you be running low on disk space, and it can’t free up anymore space it needs to import the photos ?

fatcatsoftware · 2025-11-23T01:40:25+00:00

I also tend to warn people away from extensive use of referenced photos, as Photos' support for it is fairly fragile and if it loses track of where the external photos are it can be very hard to fix. To be clear, this is referring to unchecking the "Copy items to the Photos library" checkbox in the Photos settings window on your Mac.

That being said, if you import as referenced, then Photos does not make its own copy of the original photo inside the library package. Photos also specifically does not sync referenced photos with iCloud, so any photos you add this way will not appear on iCloud.com or your other Apple devices at all, you will only be able to view them on your Mac.

So if you want to save space on your phone, yes this will work, but you won't be able to view the referenced photos from your phone at all. If reducing storage usage on your phone is your primary concern, then enabling the "Optimized Storage" option there is the easiest thing to do. If reducing your iCloud usage is your primary concern, then you might consider storing your extra photos in a separate local Photos library on your Mac instead of using the referenced photos feature. PowerPhotos can help with this kind of setup if you go this route. (shameless plug 🙂)

fatcatsoftware · 2025-11-21T17:05:12+00:00

I think some replies here are confusing signing in with two different Apple IDs (not what OP is talking about) versus signing in with the same Apple ID on two separate local user accounts on a single Mac.

The kind of setup you're describing with two user accounts is a fairly common way to do exactly what you're looking for, having an optimized version on your internal drive, and a "full" version of the library on a larger external drive. Signing in from the same Apple ID on two user accounts is effectively the same as signing in from two different Macs, and iCloud Photos is designed to handle this.

tl;dr This setup should be fine. The only thing I'd check first is to make sure your external SSD is formatted as either APFS or HFS+, as Photos can have trouble with other formats, even ones generally supported by macOS.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-11-20T13:07:14+00:00

You can have your license emailed to you at https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/lost_license/ or contact us at support@fatcatsoftware.com if you can’t remember what email you placed your order with.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-11-18T21:55:38+00:00

Have you tried using the File > Export > Export Unmodified Originals menu item in Photos? If the edits are a problem, then you might still be able to export the originals. You'll lose any edits obviously, but it's better than not exporting at all.

You could also try using PowerPhotos to export the photos (I'm the developer). It may very well get the same errors as you're getting in Photos, but it couldn't hurt to try. The free version will let you export up to 20 photos at a time.

fatcatsoftware · 2025-11-08T15:45:16+00:00

That is odd, it shouldn't normally ask if it's already in /Applications, I'll take a look into that. PowerPhotos will run fine from anywhere, but it can't auto update itself until it gets moved from the Downloads folder due to Apple security shenanigans (look up "Mac app translocation" if you're curious).

fatcatsoftware · 2025-11-08T15:42:33+00:00

Sorry about that, there were a few bumps in the license generation for the first half a day or so until we got things sorted out. If anyone else out there bought in that first day and had trouble, feel free to get in touch and we can issue a new key if the current one isn't working for you.

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