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   PowerPhotos Enables Ventura Users to Migrate iPhoto and Aperture Libraries

   Adam Engst

   Fat Cat Software's [1]PowerPhotos has long held a spot on my
   recommendation list, as did its predecessor, iPhoto Library Manager.
   Both apps can make changes directly within the wacky packages that
   Apple built for the Photos and iPhoto libraries. They also added
   features beyond what Apple provides, particularly in letting you merge
   libraries and export subsets of libraries without losing metadata or
   editing history.

   Fat Cat has upped the ante again with PowerPhotos 2.3, offering a
   lifeline to users missing support for iPhoto and Aperture migration
   into Photos in macOS 13 Ventura. Apple dropped that capability from
   Ventura, assuming rightly that most people have already made the
   transition in the 8 years since Photos replaced both iPhoto and
   Aperture. But there could still be hundreds of thousands of people who
   never got around to it, or who suddenly find a library on an old backup
   or Mac. Before the release of PowerPhotos 2.3, the only option for
   Ventura users was to import just the photos stored in iPhoto or
   Aperture libraries, losing albums, stored edit history, and metadata in
   the process. That's better than nothing, of course, but less than
   ideal.

   PowerPhotos developer Brian Webster has made this lifeline broadly
   available by including library browsing and conversion to a new,
   standalone Photos library among the features offered with the [2]free
   version of PowerPhotos. For many people, conversion might be enough. If
   you want to carry out any more complicated operations'copying,
   exporting, merging, and so forth'you'll need a paid license.

   You can [3]read more details about how PowerPhotos converts iPhoto and
   Aperture libraries, plus see a detailed chart of how it differs from
   Apple's earlier Photos migration capabilities. The main limitations are
   that PowerPhotos converts smart albums to regular albums, can't
   preserve face data, and requires more disk space to make new copies of
   the migrated photos. On the plus side, it supports all iPhoto library
   versions, allows copying of individual photos and albums, and can merge
   a migrated library into an existing one.

   PowerPhotos costs $29.95 for one user on up to two Macs and includes a
   copy of iPhoto Library Manager for those with Macs old enough that
   iPhoto and Aperture still work. The free version can be used on any
   number of Macs.

   I've been a huge fan of PowerPhotos for all the things it does that
   Photos lacks, including advanced search, advanced deduplication (a more
   modest form appeared only in the most recent crop of Apple's operating
   systems: iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and Ventura), much more extensive export
   options, and copying images with all their Photos-related associated
   data intact. This conversion capability is just another feather in an
   already rather showy cap.

References

   1. https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/
   2. https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/Docs/registration.html
   3. https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/VersionedDocs/v7/migrate_libraries.html

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