PowerPhotos 3.2 adds a whole bunch of new export features
I’m happy to announce the release of PowerPhotos 3.2, featuring a major expansion of export capabilities. Exporting was introduced in PowerPhotos 2.0, and honestly hasn’t been touched much since then. However, over time I’ve been accumulating feature requests, and with this release I decided to knock off the most requested additions.
XMP support
PowerPhotos has always been able to write metadata (titles, captions, keywords, dates, and locations) to EXIF and IPTC fields, and this release adds embedded XMP on top of that. This provides more reliable reading of metadata from other programs, such as making sure a list of comma separated keywords doesn’t get interpreted as one long keyword with commas in it.
XMP sidecar files
In addition to embedded XMP metadata, you can now also have PowerPhotos include .xmp sidecar files alongside the exported images. This is especially handy for preserving metadata when exporting RAW photos.
Export original with metadata
This new option allows for preserving the pixel data of each original photo without any modification, while still updating the exported photo’s metadata fields with any changes that you’ve made while the photo is in the Photos library. If you’ve ever wanted to get your original photos out of Photos while keeping all the titles, keywords, and other metadata you’ve added, this option will let you do exactly that.
Match original format
When exporting edited photos, in addition to just choosing a single format to export everything, you can now have each individual photo exported matching its original format. So for example, each JPG is exported as a JPG, each HEIC as a HEIC, each PNG as a PNG, etc.
Whole library export
If you’ve ever wanted to export your entire library, you know the tedious drill: select all your photos in Photos, export them, then try to manually recreate your album structure in the Finder. PowerPhotos 3.2 aims to make this process much less painful. You can now export an entire library right from within PowerPhotos, which will create one folder containing all the library’s photos, and another folder containing your entire album hierarchy.
Album linking
When exporting your whole library or a hierarchy of albums, because it’s possible for a single photo to be in multiple albums in Photos, this could cause multiple copies of a given photo to be written out during export, taking up extra disk space. The new album linking option will export only a single copy of a given photo, then if that photo is present in any other albums, PowerPhotos will create a link to the original photo instead of exporting a separate copy. Linking options include hard links, symlinks, and file clones (APFS only), saving you both disk space and time.
Other improvements and bug fixes
- Help buttons: Added help buttons next to the options when setting up an export, making it easier to understand what each setting does without having to consult the documentation.
- Settings persistence: Changes to export settings are now saved more reliably from one export to the next.
- Export reports: Export operations now generate detailed reports showing success and failure counts for each asset, providing visibility into export results similar to photo transfer and duplicate finding operations.
- Video keywords: Fixed a bug where keywords would not be included in exported videos.
- Library selection: We now select the library that was exported from in the library list after an export is completed or cancelled.
- Performance: Right clicking a large folder in the album list no longer causes a lengthy hang in PowerPhotos.
- Progress reporting: Improved progress reporting during the early stages of an export operation.
- Error handling: Export now has improved handling of missing and incomplete photos. It will log a more useful error message for missing photos, explaining why they can’t be exported, rather than a cryptic error message from Photos. For incomplete photos, it now does a better job of falling back to exporting whatever data is available if some parts of a photo/video are missing.
- Video dates: Fixed a bug where exported videos would sometimes have a date with the incorrect time zone.
PowerPhotos 3.2 is a free update for all registered PowerPhotos 3 users. You can download it by clicking the “Check For Updates” menu item if you’re already running PowerPhotos, or you can download the latest version from the PowerPhotos website.