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.

Capto: One App to Record, Edit, and Share Your Screen

This post is sponsored by Global Delight, makers of Capto.

If you’ve ever tried to put together a screen recording to explain a workflow, a feature, or a concept, you know how quickly it turns into a multi-app job. One app to record, another to edit, a third to annotate, something else to share. By the time you’ve bounced between all of them, you’ve usually lost the thread of what you were trying to explain.

Capto does all of that in one place.

It’s a screen recording, capture, and editing app for Mac that handles the whole process without you ever switching apps. You can record your full screen or a selected region. Add a webcam overlay and voice narration while you record. Then edit, annotate, and share, all from within Capto.

The annotation tools are where Capto earns its keep for instructional content. You can add arrows, text, highlights, and blur out anything you don’t want visible. The scrolling capture feature handles full-page and long-interface captures. These are the kind that are awkward to document any other way.

Beyond annotations, Capto has video editing built in. Trimming, cropping, cutting. The basics you need to remove a fumbled intro or a section where you lost your train of thought. Nothing fancy, but it covers what most recording projects actually need.

The use cases are broad. Remote teams walking colleagues through processes, trainers building onboarding materials, educators recording lessons. Any situation where you need to explain something visually and get it cleaned up fast. Capto keeps that whole workflow inside one app instead of five.

If that sounds like your kind of tool, Capto is worth a serious look. It’s available on the Mac App Store and the Global Delight website.

MailMaven: The Email Client for Mac Power Users (Sponsor)

My thanks to SmallCubed for sponsoring MacSparky this week.

When Apple pulled the rug out from under third-party Mail plugins, a lot of power users lost tools they depended on. SmallCubed’s MailSuite (MailTags, Mail Act-On) was one of the big ones. Rather than walk away, the SmallCubed team did something ambitious. They built their own email client from scratch.

MailMaven is that client, and it’s built specifically for Mac users who want more control over their email without handing their messages to someone else’s servers. Your mail stays on your provider and your computer. Nothing gets routed through a third party. If you care about privacy, MailMaven also supports end-to-end encryption via PGP.

The feature set reads like a wish list for anyone who’s ever outgrown Apple Mail. There’s a powerful tagging system that goes well beyond labels. You can attach dates, notes, and colors to messages. The rules engine is extensive, giving you fine-grained control over how incoming and outgoing messages get sorted. Smart mailboxes and fast search make it easy to find anything in your archive.

If you’re coming from Apple Mail, migration is seamless. And if you want to go deep, Joe Kissell wrote two books on the app, “Get To Know MailMaven” and “Take Control of MailMaven,” both included free with your purchase.

A couple of things worth noting on the roadmap: version 1.1 is coming at the end of the month and will add POP support. AppleScript support is in the works for version 1.2 later this year. MailMaven will also be featured on ScreencastsOnline in upcoming episodes.

MailMaven is a one-time purchase that includes the first year of updates and data syncing. You can keep using the app indefinitely, and extended maintenance plans are available if you want continued feature updates down the road. No subscription required.

MacSparky readers can get 20% off their purchase with coupon code MACSPARKY2026 at checkout. That includes the first year of updates and data syncing. The offer runs through the end of March.

Check out MailMaven →

PowerPhotos 3.0 is Here

Screenshot of PowerPhotos 3.0 showing batch metadata editing features for a photo titled "Burt’s" with keywords “Albuquerque” and “Vacation.”

PowerPhotos 3.0 has officially landed, and it’s a big one.

For the uninitiated, PowerPhotos is a utility that fills in the gaps in Apple’s Photos app. It’s long been the Photos utility of choice for many Mac power users, offering features like multiple library management, duplicate detection, and the ability to copy albums between libraries while preserving edits and metadata.

Version 3.0 brings a host of smart new features, including:

Batch metadata editing — You can now edit photo titles, keywords, and captions right inside PowerPhotos, with batch editing tools that support templating, auto-numbering, and more.
Advanced search — A new indexing engine lets you search by criteria not supported in Photos, like file size, dimensions, video duration, and more. You can also save your smart searches, which support nested logic.
Improved photo browser and viewer — The app now updates live with changes to your library, includes a built-in photo viewer, and allows you to move or delete photos and albums, all with full undo support.
Library management improvements — You can now move (not just copy) content between libraries, and select multiple libraries for batch operations.

To top it all off, this marks the 10th anniversary of PowerPhotos (and the 20th of its predecessor, iPhoto Library Manager!). To celebrate, the app is 10% off through May 16.

You can download it for free, with advanced features available by purchasing a $39.95 license. Existing users can upgrade at a 50% discount.

If you work with large or multiple Photos libraries, this is one utility that deserves a spot in your Applications folder.

Whither Apple Calendar?

I have noted that Apple continues to make progress on its productivity application suite. Apple Notes is no longer a joke; it is a powerful tool that many people are using effectively. Reminders is also on an upswing. While certainly not a tier-one task manager, it has most of the features that people are looking for and continues to make yearly improvements.

Apple’s Calendar app is the exception, however. There’s been a lot of evolution in how we manage calendars, and Calendar has yet to keep up with any of it. While the application is acceptable for keeping track of dental and other appointments, even its touted Reminders integration (introduced in macOS Sequoia) is half-baked. A powerful calendar app can make a huge difference in our productivity if harnessed correctly. The problem with Calendar is that it doesn’t have any of the tools necessary to do so. Moreover, from the outside, it looks like Apple has no intention of ever adding those features.

Unread for Mac

I’ve always considered Unread one of the most attractive RSS reader apps. However, there has never been a Mac version. Today marks the release of Unread for Mac. It’s an RSS reader made with taste. It has great typography, themes, search, and compatibility with the usual suspects. I love having this app on my Mac.

Tinderbox 10 Is Here

It seems to be software updates season. Tinderbox version 10 is now available with a new Gaudí view designed to use the screen more efficiently and make brainstorming easier. If you’re unaware, Tinderbox is one of the best thinking and planning apps available for the Mac. I am pleased to see this application continue to get further development and new features.

The New Overcast

Congratulations to Marco Arment on shipping the new Overcast. The new version is a complete rewrite and redesign that runs faster and uses Apple’s latest technologies.

By far, my favorite applications are the ones developed by solo or small teams that are obsessive about design and performance. Marco fits that mold with Overcast. Looking through the new app, you can see that he was intentional about every button and screen.

When the Antivirus Software Is the Virus

Last week’s CrowdStrike outage is pretty concerning. It’s shocking how a mistake by one software company can shut down so many global industries.

While I understand that antivirus software is necessary, its existence always represents a vulnerability. It has to embed itself deep in the system to do its work. Any mistake in that software, whether the result of negligence or malice, can cause the exact damage the software is engineered to avoid. Fortunately, Apple uses an Endpoint Security framework and therefore avoided the CrowdStrike fiasco.

Brett Terpstra’s Conductor

I’m a little late with this one, but I wanted to congratulate my friend Brett Terpstra on the release of Conductor. This new command line utility is an add-on for Brett’s successful Marked app. As the name implies, this utility acts as a train conductor for Marked 2, allowing you to set up and run custom processors to make Marked 2 even more powerful and automation-friendly.

Brett goes deeper into Conductor in this post. He even added some functionality a few days ago.