Announcing PowerPhotos

Today, Apple finally released their new Photos app, which will serve as a replacement for the venerable iPhoto. Many of you have asked about how this will work in conjunction with iPhoto Library Manager. I’m pleased to announce that Fat Cat Software is providing a new application to help you manage your libraries with Photos, and that new app is called PowerPhotos!There are several reasons why I decided that creating a separate app would be preferable that trying to fold support for Photos directly into iPhoto Library Manager itself. ​In mocking up how the user interface would work, it quickly became obvious that handling both iPhoto libraries and Photos libraries from the same interface would introduce many opportunities for confusion, and would not be a good experience. The new Photos app has been written from the ground up and simplified in many ways. While this is a good thing overall, especially given how poorly iPhoto has aged over the years, there is a lack of functionality in some areas that makes it impossible to implement all of iPhoto Library Manager’s feature set with Photos, at least for the time being. Specifically, the photo copying and library merging features will not be available in PowerPhotos 1.0, though I will be actively exploring the best way to include that sort of functionality in a future release. Because Photos only runs on OS X Yosemite, this means that PowerPhotos does not need to support earlier versions of OS X. This provides a clean break from legacy support that will allow PowerPhotos to more easily take advantage of new features that Apple adds to OS X. Aside from copying and merging, PowerPhotos lets you do all the same things with Photos libraries that iPLM does with iPhoto libraries, including: Create and manage any number of Photos libraries Browse and search through all your photos without needing to open each library in Photos itself See at a glance which library is set as your system library, and whether it’s syncing with iCloud Easily reveal individual photos in the Finder Find and eliminate duplicate photos in your libraries Use PowerPhotos migration assistant to ease the process of migrating your existing iPhoto and Aperture libraries over to Photos PowerPhotos will be free for all existing iPhoto Library Manager customers. Due to the smaller feature set, I’ve decided to offer PowerPhotos at a lower price point of $19.95. iPhoto Library Manager 4 will continue to be sold at its current price of $29.95, and will also include a free copy of PowerPhotos; the serial number you receive with your purchase can be used with both programs. This also applies to existing iPLM customers, who can just use their existing serial number with PowerPhotos. iPhoto is not disappearing overnight, so iPhoto Library Manager will continue to be supported as well. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on PowerPhotos, and I’m aiming to have it ready for release next week. You can subscribe to our blog, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our mailing list at the bottom of this page to receive further updates when PowerPhotos is available for download.