Opening libraries with the PowerPhotos status menu

PowerPhotos provides a global status menu that appears in the icons on the right hand side of your menu bar at the top of the screen. You can enable the PowerPhotos status menu by opening the preferences window in PowerPhotos and checking the “Show PowerPhotos in menu bar” checkbox. The menu item will remain in the menu bar, even after restarting your Mac. To remove the menu, uncheck the “Show PowerPhotos in menu bar” checkbox.

Clicking on the PowerPhotos status menu will show you a list of all the libraries you have in PowerPhotos. Selecting a library from the list will quickly open that library up in Photos for you to view and edit. This menu can remain in the menu bar even when PowerPhotos isn’t running, giving you fast access to all your libraries at all times.

macOS Ventura Login Items macOS 13.0 Ventura introduces a new Login Items section in the System Settings app that lets you control what apps have permission to launch background tasks at login. If you enable the PowerPhotos status menu, PowerPhotos will appear in this list in System Settings, indicating that is has permission to open its helper app (called PowerPhotosMenu) in the background, which controls the status menu.

Once PowerPhotos has been granted permission here, it will remain visible in the Login Items list even if you later turn off the PowerPhotos status menu in the PowerPhotos preferences window. Its presence in the list only indicates that it has permission to launch its helper in the background, but does not necessarily mean that the helper is actually running. If you want to see whether the helper is running, open Activity Monitor and search for “PowerPhotosMenu”. This is the only background process that PowerPhotos launches, and PowerPhotos will not run anything else in the background after the main PowerPhotos app has been quit.