Power up Photos

Your photo library and editor packs more punch with third-party extensions and geotagging

35> Extensions

Photos’ editing capabilities take a big step forward with support for extensions, which enable third-party developers to make image-editing tools from their own apps available inside Photos (much like on iOS). This saves you exporting an image, editing it elsewhere, and bringing it back into Photos. Open a photo and click Edit > Extensions > More to view those available on your Mac. Extensions are bundled with apps from the Mac App Store.

36> Faces and Selfies and Screenshots

Faces has an improved interface. Click Albums > Faces and you can now select multiple photos (holding ç to build a selection) and then drag them onto a face in the middle of the screen to identify all of them as being that person in one fell swoop. This greatly speeds up how quickly you can name people that the app identifies in your photos, and in the process you more quickly guide its identifications in the future.

37> Manually attach locations

One of the great things about snapping photos with an iPhone is geolocation tagging, which lets you know where photos were taken. Photos now enables you to manually attach location data to photos that lack it, and modify it on those that do. Select an image and open the Info window ( ç+I) and you’ll see a row labelled Assign a Location at the bottom of it. Type a place name or postcode and pick one from the app’s suggested matches.

38> Batch renaming

In Yosemite, the app’s Info window only enabled keywords to be set on multiple photos at once, but in Photos 1.1 you can simultaneously add the same title, description and, of course, location data for all photos in your selection. If you then choose to export photos that have the same title using that title as their filename, those past the first one will have a number in brackets appended to their name.