PowerPhotos – The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by PowerPhotos. Apple has done a great job the last few years getting photo management under control with their new Photos app and cloud storage solutions. Photos, however, like any Apple mainstream software, is missing a lot of geeky power tools serious users need.



Screen Shot 2017-07-31 at 10.15.11 AM.png


That’s where PowerPhotos comes in. If you have photos scattered across multiple libraries that you want to merge together, have a library that you want to split up because it’s gotten too large, or just want to get rid of duplicate photos, PowerPhotos can help you get your photo collection back in order.

PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your photos without even opening up Photos itself, a multi-library search feature, and more.

You may recall an app from the iPhoto days called iPhoto Library Manager that gave you a similar set of tools. PowerPhotos is by the same developer and it’s just as reliable.

So go check out PowerPhotos today. Best of all, MacSparky readers get a 20% discount. Just use the code MACSPARKY at check out.

Free Agents 26: A Batphone to My Heart




The latest episode of the Free Agents is available for download. Telephones and text messaging seem like necessary evils at best, but for many small businesses they’re required. You just need to figure out how to use them effectively–and set rules so that they aren’t abused. While Jason leaves the phone off the hook, David describes his trial of Google Voice and ultimate decision to use a live receptionist service.

TextExpander Snippets for Fun and Shenanigans

I enjoyed this post over at TextExpander.com showing off some of the more fun tricks you can pull off with TextExpander. I would add to this that the ability to add emojis with keyboard shortcuts is pretty useful and more than a parlor trick. I’ve done something similar but use shorter abbreviations than recommended in the linked post. For instance, when I type “:tu”, TextExpander autofills a thumbs-up emoji: 👍🏻.

I find myself using these to respond to text messages and even simple emails all the time, and assigning your favorite emoji to TextExpander shortcuts can save you a lot of time.

MPU 387 – Workflows with Rene Ritchie




The latest episode of Mac Power Users is live. Our guest, Rene Ritchie, discusses his favorite tools, workflows, and apps for getting work done as editor-in-chief of iMore. Rene also explains what it is like to try and get Apple services outside the United States and how to deal with your Apple gear in extremely cold weather.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. 
  • The Omni Group We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad. 
  • Marketcircle We help small business grow with great Mac, iPhone and iPad apps including Daylight and Billings Pro.
  • Sanebox Stop drowning in email!

Daylite: The Mac CRM for Small Businesses (Sponsor)




For those of you who don’t know about Daylite, it has been around for over 15 years. Daylite is a Mac CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) that helps you get new business and deliver on your promises. Whether you are contacting new leads or reviewing your list of past clients to see who is in need of your services, Daylite helps you track everything. From a single lead or client, you can see every email, every booked or upcoming appointment, who referred them, pending business deals, active projects, and even future follow-ups. 

From a single project, you can see all of the important emails, files, completed tasks, as well as upcoming tasks and who is responsible. Daylite also has custom pipelines so you can visually track the stage of each project. 

The Daylite team is always coming up with new ways to help Daylite make business more productive. They have recently announced that they are working on Daylite Mail for iPhone and iPad.

If you are looking for a mature, reliable system to manage your business, look no further. You can even read about other companies using Daylite here.

OmniGraffle 3 for iOS


sweat-the-details@2x.png

The Omni Group recently released version 3 of their popular diagramming and graphics tool for iPad, OmniGraffle. The new version add several new features including multi-column interface, a floating tool palette that gets out of your way, expanded keyboard shortcuts, art boards and are board layers, SVG paste on canvas, and more.

One of the things I really like about the new version is the refinement of the interface and user tools with the moving pallet and overall attention to detail for making a professional level application for the iPad that is both powerful and easy to learn and use.

I have always thought of this application as pretty special. It’s one of the first applications for iPad that really took advantage of multitouch as an alternative input mechanism. From the beginning, the Omni Group has been refining and perfecting this interface in OmniGraffle and you can clearly see benefits of all that work in this third version.

Moreover, this time I got to spend a fair amount of time on the inside. I produced the tutorial videos for the new version for the Omni Group and saw the painstaking efforts the developers and designers went through to get this application just right.

There’s a lot of talk these days about what you can and cannot do on iPad. To me, one thing is clear. You can make beautiful diagrams and related graphics on an iPad with OmniGraffle. Check out OmniGraffle three for IOS the Omni Group website.