Files and folders

Subfolders

If you are exporting albums, PowerPhotos can organize the exported photos into subfolders in several ways:

• None: All photos will be exported into a single flat folder
• Album hierarchy: Photos will be organized into folders that mirror the album hierarchy in your library. You can choose whether to include smart albums in the folder hierarchy. This option is only available if you have selected one or more albums to export, and will not be listed if you have selected photos to export instead of albums.
• Library folder + album hierarchy: This option is only available if you have selected to export an entire library. PowerPhotos will create two subfolders. The first, named “Library”, will contain all the photos/videos from the library exported in one flat folder. The second, named “Albums”, will contain the hierarchy of albums that you have created in the library in Photos. The files created in the Albums folder and its subfolders will link to the copies exported to the Library folder as described below.

When using album-based organization, PowerPhotos can handle photos that appear in multiple albums in several ways:

• Separate copies: Each photo will be exported once for each album it appears in, resulting in multiple copies of the same photo.
• Hard links: Photos that appear in multiple albums will be linked together using hard links, so they take up only one copy’s worth of disk space. With hard link, the two copies of the file share the underlying data, so modifications made to one will appear if you view the other. Either file can be deleted without affecting the other.
• Symbolic links: Photos that appear in multiple albums will be linked together using symbolic links. Here, the link refers to the other file by path, so if you delete or move the original photo, it will break any symlinks that were pointing to it.
• File clones: On APFS volumes, photos that appear in multiple albums will be linked together using file clones, which are copy-on-write duplicates that initially take up no additional disk space. This is functionally equivalent to making two independent copies of the file, so unlike with hard links, modifications made to one file will not appear when viewing the other file.

File naming

You can choose what filenames PowerPhotos uses for the exported photos:

• Filename: Uses the original filename of the photo when it was first imported into the library.
• Title: If you have given custom titles to your photos, PowerPhotos will use that title as the filename. For photos without a title, PowerPhotos will fall back to using the filename instead.
• Sequential: PowerPhotos will name each photo with the same prefix, and an incrementing number appended to the end. For example, if you specify the prefix “image_”, then the exported files will be named “image_001.jpg”, “image_002.jpg”, and so forth.

If the file naming option you choose results in more than one photo having the same filename (e.g. if the “Filename” option is selected, and you export two different photos named “IMG_0001.JPG” to the same folder), then PowerPhotos will automatically append a number to the end of the additional copies of the photo to avoid filename collisions (e.g. “IMG_0001 2.JPG”)

File creation/modification date

By default, the files created by PowerPhotos will have a creation date shown in the Finder of when the export was performed. If you select the “Photo date” option instead, then PowerPhotos will assign the date the photo was taken (including any adjustments you’ve made to the photo’s date using Photos) as the file’s creation date instead. A similar setting is provided for setting the Finder modification date as well.

When file already exists

When exporting to an existing folder, if there are files already present in that folder, then it’s possible that PowerPhotos will need to export a file to a location where a file already exists. In this case, you have three options:

• Replace existing file: the existing file will be overwritten by the newly exported one
• Keep existing file: PowerPhotos will skip exporting the photo, and keep the existing file in place instead
• Rename exported file: PowerPhotos will choose a new name for the exported file by appending a number to the end of the filename, so that both the existing file and exported file will be in the folder side by side