PowerPhotos not displaying recent changes to a library

If you are doing work in one of your Photos libraries and switch back to PowerPhotos while doing so, it’s possible you will not immediately see your recent changes reflecting in the PowerPhotos window. The reasons for this are different depending on whether you are dealing with the system photo library or not.

The system photo library PowerPhotos depends on OS X to provide the latest contents of the system photo library so it can display them in its photo browser. This service does not always reliably update with the latest changes in a timely fashion though, so it may take a minute or more for new changes to be shown in PowerPhotos. You can try forcing a refresh of the library by control-clicking on it in the library list and selecting “Refresh” from the contextual menu that comes up. If all else fails, try quitting PowerPhotos and relaunching it to see the latest changes.

Other libraries For other libraries, PowerPhotos will be unable to refresh the library contents while that library is still open in Photos itself. To make sure you’re seeing the latest library contents, quit the Photos app. PowerPhotos should see that Photos has quit and automatically start reloading the library, which will be indicating by a spinning progress indicator at the top of the PowerPhotos window.