Preferences

To access PowerPhotos’ preferences, click on the “PowerPhotos” menu and select “Preferences”. There you will find the following settings:

General

• Quit PowerPhotos after closing the main window: checking this box will keep PowerPhotos running even if you close the main window. This can be useful if you wish to use the dock menu to have quick access to your photo libraries.
• Use small icons in library list: if you have a large number of libraries in your library list and would like to be able to see more of them at a time, checking this box will reduce the size of each row in the list, allowing more libraries to fit vertically in the list.
• Show exclamation mark badges on missing photos: enabling this option will cause a small exclamation mark icon to appear in the lower left corner of any photo that can’t be found at the location in the library where Photos says it should be. There isn’t any direct way to fix such missing photos though, so if you’d rather not be bothered by these warning icons, you can just leave this option disabled.
• Warn when removing a library: by default, you will be given a warning message when attempting to remove a library, confirming that you really want to remove it. You can uncheck this option if you would not like this warning to appear.
• Automatically check for updates: checking this box will make PowerPhotos check on the internet for new versions at regular intervals. You can also check for updates manually using the “Check For Updates” menu item.
• When renaming a library: this controls what happens when you rename a library from within PowerPhotos. You can either have PowerPhotos make the library’s name on disk match the name you give in PowerPhotos, or only change the name in PowerPhotos and leave the library on disk alone. The “Ask” option will present a choice to you each time you rename a library.
• Background: allows you to change the background color of the main photo browser and the duplicate browser from the default white to any shade of grey you might prefer. Note that this option is not visible on macOS Mojave, where PowerPhotos will instead follow your system wide preferences for light or dark mode.

Photo Copying

• Show preview before copying: when enabled, you will be shown a preview of what your library will look like after the copy takes place, and which duplicate photos will be skipped.
• Don’t copy duplicate photos: if this box is checked when you copy photos from one library to another, any photos that are duplicates of ones already in the destination library will be skipped. Otherwise, all photos will be imported, even if the destination library already contains copies of them.
• Duplicate comparison options: read more about these options in the “How to compare photos” section of the Starting the duplicate finding process section of the manual.
• When copying bursts: if you copy a burst mode photo between libraries, you can choose to have PowerPhotos either copy all the photos from the burst, or just copy the key photo that is displayed for the burst, leaving the rest of the burst photos behind.
• Copy Live Photo videos: when enabled, both the photo and video components of Live Photos will be preserved when copying or merging libraries, otherwise only the photo will be copied. If you are not concerned with retaining the video portion of your Live Photos, disabling this can speed up copying times (especially across a network) and help use less disk space.
• Copy photo information: specifies which attributes on your photos you want to be preserved when copying between libraries
• Copy unedited originals: the unedited original version of each photo will be copied; edits that have been made to the photos will not be preserved
• Copy edited JPGs: if the photo has been edited, then the resulting JPG copy of the photo will be copied to the destination library; originals will be copied for unedited photos and for all videos