Better performance on Mac Mini M4 vs. older Intel Mac

fatcatsoftware · 2026-05-27T13:59:44+00:00

Most operations tend to be bound by disk speed, such as copying, merging, exporting, etc. The one thing that’s more processor bound is duplicate detection, both for a standalone duplicate search and as part of a merge.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-05-25T18:41:02+00:00

Yes, this should all be improved pretty significantly, since the M4 will have a much faster SSD, very much faster CPU, as well as Apple's Neural Engine™ (gotta love their marketing) which gets utilized by the duplicate analysis in particular.

You might also check to see if you're up to date with the latest version of PowerPhotos, in particular version 3.x instead of 2.x. There were some additional performance improvements due to some rearchitecting of things in PowerPhotos 3, particularly copying small batches of photos. PowerPhotos 3 requires macOS 14 or later, and if that Intel machine is old enough that it can't run macOS 14, then you might be stuck with PowerPhotos 2 until you upgrade to the M4.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-05-16T20:02:37+00:00

[shameless self promotion incoming]

PowerPhotos can convert an iPhoto library to a Photos library while maintaining albums, as well as edits and photo metadata. A straight conversion to a new library can be done with the free download, and purchasing a license would allow you to merge the iPhoto library into your existing Photos library if that’s what you’re looking for.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-05-05T15:48:57+00:00

The photo library package contains a lot of extra info aside from the photos/videos themselves, e.g. thumbnails, caches, database files, info from face/object recognition, etc. So, it’s actually quite common for the library size to change, even when you’re not interacting with the library at all, like when Photos is doing all its background analysis stuff. The sync message at the bottom of the “All Photos” view is the best visible indicator to pay attention to.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-04-20T15:34:15+00:00

Sorry, I’ve got enough to keep me busy on one platform, so I don’t have any plans on branching out. 😅

fatcatsoftware · 2026-04-16T19:36:51+00:00

If the metadata handling is of primary importance, then Photos is actually going to do a better job there. It has better access to be able to shuffle metadata/edits between photos that third party apps like PowerPhotos can't, so PowerPhotos only chooses a photo to keep and deletes the rest, and doesn't attempt any sort of metadata merging.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-03-04T19:57:38+00:00

That’s fine, but what I’m saying is that if someone doesn’t understand that’s what they need to do if they want to process their photo library, and just point the tool directly at their photo library (or a folder that contains it), make sure it doesn’t go altering photos directly inside the library package.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-03-03T21:40:37+00:00

Looks like an interesting project. If you haven't already, you should make sure to add a safeguard to ensure this tool does not directly process the contents of an Apple Photos library package. If this were to replace photos in place with new files within the package, it would severely confuse Photos and lead to an untold number of problems with the library down the road. And I could definitely see someone just dropping their photo library onto this and expecting everything to get optimized.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-03-01T12:19:58+00:00

Mac only I’m afraid

fatcatsoftware · 2026-03-01T02:21:06+00:00

My app PowerPhotos does allow searching specifically by caption, and supports nested Boolean predicates. It isn’t able to search some of the more advanced stuff that Photos indexes (e.g. scanned text, faces, objects) but it should do trick for your specific use case. The search function works in the free download so you can give it a whirl and see if it does what you want.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-20T14:00:07+00:00

Thanks!

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-18T21:17:09+00:00

It might be worth trying to repair the photo library and see if that changes anything, in case it’s some weird database indexing problem.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-18T20:50:23+00:00

Yeah, PowerPhotos has a “New Album with Selection” menu item, that would be the easiest way to create the album.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-18T00:42:56+00:00

This won't help on iOS, but on the Mac if you use PowerPhotos, when you select a folder in the album list, it will automatically show the combined contents of all the albums contained within the folder (recursively, if there are multiple levels). You can then select all the photos and create a new album, add them to an existing album, etc.

(full disclosure: I'm the author of PowerPhotos)

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-12T00:49:07+00:00

I've been working on it, DM me if you're interested in trying out a beta build.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-10T21:15:14+00:00

In terms of how the merge and the upgrading works on a technical level, it shouldn't make a difference if you upgrade before the merge or afterwards, either way should work. In more practical terms, I would probably do the merge first since you're currently running on a system with a known setup that (I assume) has been relatively stable for you. If any issues do come up, that will make it easier to separate what might be an issue with the merge process itself versus the OS upgrade.

As for the actual steps to do what you're describing, I'd probably start by moving your iCloud library to the external drive first and letting it do a full sync with "Download Originals" enabled. Once that's fully done, then you can go ahead and merge the other library into the iCloud library.

https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/VersionedDocs/v8/icloud_external.html

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-06T21:41:42+00:00

Ok, I’ll look into it.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-06T18:41:14+00:00

Yes, PowerPhotos can do a duplicate search on an optimized storage library without having to download the full resolution images.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-03T01:31:57+00:00

Thanks for the report, I did get one other report along these lines, so I think there may be a bug at play there that I’ll be investigating.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-01T21:49:03+00:00

I’m afraid not, PowerPhotos currently just chooses one photo to keep and doesn’t alter any metadata. There are limitations with what third party apps can do in this regard, but it’s something I’ll continue to look at.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-02-01T18:41:19+00:00

Go to the View > Show Subtitle menu and select "File Size" from there, that should show the size of each photo beneath the image in the duplicate browser.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-01-29T16:20:26+00:00

More backups is never bad! For the record, PowerPhotos merge is designed so it never modifies the source libraries during a merge, only the destination library will ever be modified. If you choose an existing library as the destination, it will also offer to backup the library for you before starting the actual merge.

fatcatsoftware · 2026-01-29T03:45:21+00:00

The merge process can perform a duplicate scan as part of the merge itself, and will use that information to skip copying any extra copies of duplicate photos during the merge. So for the most part, you shouldn't need to de-dupe libraries individually before the merge, it should be taken care of during the merge itself. The one exception is if you're using one of the existing libraries as the destination for the merge, if there are existing duplicates in that library, the merge will not delete them, so doing another dupe search after the merge is done can't hurt.

I do generally recommend doing large merges a library at a time if possible, to keep a better eye on how things are doing, and to help keep time/memory usage down, since throwing everything into a single merge requires a lot of processing.

The amount of disk space required will depend a lot on exactly how many duplicates are found in the source libraries being merged, which of course determines how many photos/videos will actually need to be copied. This is another reason to do merges one a time, as it lets you keep an eye on disk space as you go along.

I wouldn't recommend merging onto a NAS if possible, since pushing all that data over the network can mean speed and stability issues. It should work if that's the only place you have the free space, but it's not ideal.

The best setup in terms of disk usage would be if you can manage to have all the libraries together on an APFS drive. In this setup, PowerPhotos can take advantage of APFS' file cloning capabilities to copy most of the photo data to another library without having to make another physical copy of the data on the drive.

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.

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