FotoMagico, Revisited


FotoMagico just hit 6.9. Boinx has been quietly shipping updates all year, which is a good excuse to revisit an app I suspect most of you have forgotten about.

For years, I was the designated slideshow person in my family. Weddings, memorials, graduation parties. Someone would hand me a folder full of photos and say “can you put something together for Saturday?” and I would open FotoMagico and get to work. The app made it easy to do the job well: real transitions, precise timing, Ken Burns effects that actually looked intentional, and music sync that didn’t fight you.

At some point I drifted away. The Photos app covers the basics now, and most occasions don’t demand more than that. But “the basics” is a different thing from standing in front of 150 people at a wedding reception with a twelve-minute show on a MacBook.

One piece of practical wisdom I always passed on: tell the family you need the photos a week out, and tell them the show runs about ten minutes. Eight is better. Nobody in the room actually wants a fifteen-minute slideshow. They think they do.

I’m delighted to see version 6 in the wild. The app is still actively developed, still well-designed, and still the right answer when the stakes are high enough to matter.

If you already own FotoMagico 6, the 6.9 update is free. New buyers can grab it on the Boinx developer page.

If there’s a family event coming up and someone’s already started texting you about “the photos,” now you know what to download.

The Productivity Apps That Don’t Speak Agent Will Lose

Spark Mail shipped a Mac CLI and agent skill hooks last week. Read-only email access is free. Write actions (send, move, archive) are behind the Pro subscription. Readdle also published open-source automation recipes and persona hooks for anyone building on top of it.

I want to set the specific features aside for a moment and talk about what this move represents.

The people who use productivity apps in 2026 are asking a different question than they were three years ago. It used to be: does this app do the thing well? Now it’s also: can my robot assistant work with this app?

That’s a real shift, and it’s not going away. Spark’s CLI is a direct acknowledgment that the app’s users are increasingly expecting their tools to “speak agent”. You can frame it as a niche developer feature if you want. I think that’s the wrong frame.

The users who are most engaged, most willing to pay, and most likely to recommend software to other people are exactly the ones building personal automation pipelines and wanting their apps in the loop. Readdle didn’t have to publish open-source recipes. They did it because they understand who their users are becoming.

Productivity app developers who sit this out are taking a risk. The tools that figure this out early will have an advantage. The ones that don’t will find their users migrating toward whatever does.

Mike Schmitz’s New Ideal Week Builder

Mike Schmitz shipped a free web tool for designing an ideal week template, and it is pretty clever.

The interface is a calendar grid. You drag blocks for your work hours, deep work, family time, exercise, whatever modes matter to you. You color them. You theme the days at the top. Then you export the result as a PDF, an image, an ICS file, or a Markdown document.

The export options are what set it apart. The ICS file means you can drop your ideal week into Apple Calendar or Google Calendar as a toggleable planning layer. Turn it on when you are sketching out a week. Turn it off when you are looking at the actual schedule. The Markdown export means anyone working in Obsidian can paste the template straight into a personal retreat note, a quarterly planning doc, or a roles-and-goals review.

I sat with the tool on the air while Mike walked through his on the latest episode of Focused. It slotted right into the way I already think about weekly planning. Designing an ideal week is one of the most useful things you can do for your time. Most people never do it because the friction is high. Mike’s tool brings the friction down to almost zero.

It is free. Give it a try.

Still on Kagi, Still Happy

John Gruber wrote about Kagi again this week, which is a good excuse for me to update my own take.

I’ve been a paying subscriber for a couple of years now, and I have no plans to stop. My search results are better. They come from sources I actually trust. And I’m not being tracked, profiled, or served ads based on whatever I looked up yesterday.

The subscription is $10 a month. I don’t have a Starbucks habit, so I don’t find that hard to justify. Every search I do is one less transaction with an advertising machine. That’s worth something to me.

The knock on Kagi has always been that AI search will make dedicated search engines obsolete. I don’t think that’s right, at least not yet. AI gives me a synthesized answer. Kagi gives me a set of sources I can actually go read. Those are different things, and I still need both. For “what’s a good PDF editor for Mac?” I want a synthesis. For “what’s actually happening with Apple’s App Store case in Europe?” I want links to primary sources, not a summary.

Gruber notes that he occasionally uses Kagi’s Bangs feature (!) to fall back to Google. That’s the right way to use it. Kagi first. Google as a last resort.

If you haven’t tried it, the first 100 searches are free. You’ll probably notice the difference within the first ten.

Focused 256: Time Architecture

On this episode of Focused, Mike and I pick up where we left off in episode 250 and dig into the part of weekly planning that breaks for most people.

Mike argues you should build your week around modes and roles, not triage tasks into open slots. We walk through a 168-hour exercise, talk through his new Ideal Week template tool, and get into transition rituals.

I make the case for interstitial journaling as the move that lets you set work down before picking the next thing up. In Deep Focus, Mike checks in on his meditation practice and I share what has kept me on the cushion for 33 years.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

  • Vitally: Your Copilot for AI-Powered Customer Success. Get a free pair of AirPods Pro when you book a qualified meeting.
  • Keeper: Get 60% off personal and family plans.

PowerPhotos: The Apple Photos Power Tools You’re Missing (Sponsor)

I’m happy to welcome back PowerPhotos as a MacSparky sponsor. If you spend any real time inside Apple Photos, you know what’s missing. PowerPhotos fills those gaps, and has been doing it for years.

Apple Photos was built on the idea that you have one library and you trust the algorithm. Brian Webster and the team at Fat Cat Software built PowerPhotos on the idea that you might want more control than that.

The Feature Set

  • Manage multiple Photos libraries from a single place. No more launch-and-quit dance to switch between them.
  • Find and remove duplicate photos, freeing up storage on your Mac and in iCloud Photos.
  • Merge libraries together, preserving albums, edits, and metadata.
  • Batch edit metadata on titles, captions, and keywords with fast keyboard-driven editing.
  • Run advanced exports with a level of control Apple Photos doesn’t surface anywhere in its own interface.

Each one of these is something I’ve reached for at least once over the years. The library merge is the killer feature for anyone who started with iPhoto, ended up with three or four parallel libraries, and now wants to consolidate without losing the work already in there.

Recent Updates

PowerPhotos 3.2 added new export options, including XMP support and the ability to export a full library in one shot. If you care about your metadata surviving the trip out of Apple Photos, XMP is the right answer.

PowerPhotos 3.3 brought extensive Shortcuts support. More than 30 actions covering library management, exports, finds, and tagging. You can build a shortcut that finds every photo from a trip, copies it to a separate library, and tags it on the way through. Apple Intelligence and the MCP wave will make Shortcuts support a lot more valuable, and PowerPhotos is one of the apps that’s already there.

Try It

PowerPhotos is a free download and gives you plenty without paying anything. Paying for a license adds the advanced features. Deleting duplicates, merging libraries, and unlimited copying, exporting, and metadata editing all come with the paid version.

If you already own PowerPhotos, or even the old iPhoto Library Manager, your existing key gets you 50% off the upgrade. Everyone else can use coupon code MACSPARKY26 for 20% off, for a limited time.

Check out PowerPhotos today.

Apple Recognizes 50 Developer Community Leaders

Apple launched a new page on the developer site last week honoring 50 community leaders who help the Apple developer community through teaching, content creation, events, and accessibility advocacy. WWDC 2026 starts June 8, and the timing feels intentional.

It’s a nice gesture. I mean that sincerely.

I hope it’s also the beginning of something bigger.

I talk to a lot of app developers in my work as MacSparky. Over the last few years, something has shifted. The frustration level is higher than I’ve ever seen it. Not just about specific policy decisions. There’s a feeling that Apple doesn’t see independent developers as partners, that the relationship has become more transactional and less collaborative.

Some of that frustration is about the App Store and review processes. But a lot of it is about communication. Or the lack of it. Developers find out about changes to APIs or platform behaviors from forums or third-party blogs, not from Apple. There’s an opacity to how decisions get made that’s hard to work around.

Apple’s leadership has been through meaningful changes recently. New people in key roles. That creates an opening. I know a few of the people on that list. I’m rooting for all of them. And I’m cautiously hopeful that someone in Cupertino is paying attention to what they’re saying, not just what they’re shipping.

Mac Power Users 849: Managing Photos

On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I dig into the wide and messy world of Apple photo management. We talk about pruning enormous libraries, what’s worth keeping, and the cleanup apps we trust to help. We also get into iCloud Shared Photo Library trade-offs and the fact that Apple’s 5 GB free tier is older than the iPad.

There’s a long section on scanning legacy prints with Google PhotoScan and the Epson FastFoto, plus the mail-in services we recommend and the one we’d skip. Set up Apple Digital Legacy Contact and 1Password Families emergency access tonight if you haven’t. The lightning round covers HEIF, Live Photos, and the one Apple setting we both wish we’d flipped years ago.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for Mac.
  • 1Password: Never forget a password again.