POWERPHOTOS 3: TIME-SAVING APPLE PHOTOS TOOL FOR POWER USERS ON THE MAC

Since its first appearance in 2015, PowerPhotos (fave. co/3XpwB4p) 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.

- GLENN FLEISHMAN

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. The 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, fave. co/44Bh078.) 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.

If you need to merge Photos libraries, PowerPhotos is the only recourse. You can de-duplicate in the process.