Browsing tips and tricks

Here are a few tips and tricks to help efficiently find the photos you’re looking for in your libraries.

• Your library’s moments are listed in the “Moments” group in the album list. The moments will be listed in the same date order they’re sorted in the library in Photos itself.
• Photos marked as “hidden” in Photos will still be displayed when viewing a custom album that contains the hidden photo, but not in the main “Photos” album that displays all the library’s photos. Hidden photos will not be visible at all when viewing the system photo library in PowerPhotos.
• PowerPhotos remembers the view settings separately for each library. This includes things like the position of the zoom slider, what subtitles are shown under photos, what columns are shown in list view, and so forth. Once you have things set up the way you like to view a particular library, those changes will “stick” so you don’t have to constantly reconfigure things if you want to view two libraries with different setups.
• Large Photos libraries can sometimes take a little while to fully load in the photo browser. A progress spinner will appear in the toolbar indicating when a library is currently being reloaded. Photos does cache its results once a library is loaded though, so after it’s been loaded once, viewing it subsequently will be much faster. Of course if the you make any changes to the library, it will then need to be reloaded from scratch the next time it’s selected.
• PowerPhotos cannot reload the contents of a library while that library is still open in Photos itself. If you think you’re not seeing the latest changes to a particular library in PowerPhotos, first try quitting Photos if the library is still open there. PowerPhotos should see that Photos has quit and automatically reload the library. You can also force a refresh by control-clicking on the library in PowerPhotos and selecting “Refresh” from the menu that pops up.
• If you have iCloud Photo Library enabled with the “Optimize Storage” option enabled, only the photos that have been fully downloaded to your Mac will appear when viewing that library in PowerPhotos.