Copying individual photos

In addition to copying albums, you can also drag individual photos from the PowerPhotos image browser and drop them on another library in your library list to copy the photos and their metadata over. No albums will be recreated when copying individual photos this way.

To ensure that the extra photo information such as edits, titles, descriptions, keywords, dates, and favorites will come over, you should drag the photos from PowerPhotos’ image browser, and not from a Finder window, the Photos app window, or some other program that lets you drag files. If you drag from somewhere else, they will be treated as regular photos, and the extra information associated with them from Photos will not be brought into the destination library.

In addition to dragging photos, you can select your photos then control-click on them, and use the “Copy To” contextual menu item to copy them to another library. Due to the way dragging items in macOS is implemented, if you intend to copy a large number of photos, the contextual menu will be a lot faster, as you may experience a temporary hang when you first start a large drag. You can also open libraries in separate windows and drag photos from one window to another to copy them across.

Moving photos

In some cases, you may want to move photos from one library to another rather than copy them. You can do this in PowerPhotos by holding down the command key while dragging photos across to another library, or by control-clicking on the albums and using the “Move To” contextual menu item.

To perform the move, PowerPhotos will first copy the photos over to the destination library, then once the copying is done, it will delete the photos from the library they came from (Photos will prompt you for permission to perform the deletion).

If any of the photos fail to be copied successfully (e.g. a photo is corrupt), then after finishing the copying, PowerPhotos will ask you whether you only want to delete the photos that were copied successfully, delete all the photos that you dragged across, even the ones that didn’t get copied, or don’t delete anything. You can see more detail about which photos failed to copy by clicking “View Report” in the message that’s shown when the move operation is finished.