PowerPhotos not seeing all photos for a library

PowerPhotos tries its best to show the most up to date and complete information from your libraries, but there are a few factors that can cause differences in what you see in PowerPhotos versus the Photos app itself. You can check the following if you are seeing such differences.

iCloud Photos If you have iCloud Photos enabled on your Mac, then PowerPhotos will only be able to see whatever photos have been fully downloaded locally to your Mac, and will not show any photos that are currently only present in the cloud. If you have the “Optimize Mac Storage” option enabled, this can mean that you will only see a fairly small portion of your library in PowerPhotos.

Opening the library in Photos and switching to the “Download Original to this Mac” option in the preferences window will tell Photos to download all the full size photos to your Mac, and this will let PowerPhotos access and display them. If you have only just changed this preference, it can take some time for Photos to download everything from the cloud, so it may take a while before everything will show up in PowerPhotos.

Hidden photos If you have marked any photos in your library as hidden, then those photos will not be displayed in the Photos interface, except if you look specifically in the special “Hidden” album. PowerPhotos, on the other hand, will always show hidden photos, so you may actually see more items in PowerPhotos that you see in Photos in this case.

Reloading lag After you make any changes to a library in Photos, the next time you view the library in PowerPhotos, it will need to reload the latest changes from the library on disk. This process can take a little while, especially for larger libraries, and you will see a spinning progress indicator at the top of the window while PowerPhotos is working on reloading the library. You may need to wait for that spinner to disappear before seeing the most recent changes to your library show up in PowerPhotos.