Boost Photos’ editing tools
Add Affinity Photo’s image manipulation tools to Apple’s photo manager
The benefit of using an app like Lightroom, or Apple’s nowdiscontinued Aperture, is that you get all the tools you need to manage, edit and export photographs in
one place. Neat and tidy, right? What might not be immediately obvious is that Apple’s Photos, the apparently consumer-focussed photo management app provided with macOS, provides you with a surprisingly powerful set of ‘roundtripping’ tools.
Roundtripping is the practice of opening an image in one app, exporting it directly to another app to make changes, and then returning those changes to the original image in the first app. Photos’ version of this uses Extensions, which are tools supplied by other apps that you use within Photos’ own window.
Whether you round-trip an image or simply use an extension within Photos, you can get hold of far more advanced image editing tools than are available in Photos ordinarily, while continuing to take advantage of Photos’ ability to organise and attach metadata such as locations and perform face and object analysis on people and items in your images, giving you the best of both worlds.
Adding new extensions to Photos is easy. Once you’ve installed an app that includes one or more of them – Affinity Photo is just one; Aurora HDR and Luminar are other examples – open a picture in Photos’ editing mode (see the Genius Tip on the opposite page for a shortcut). On the right you’ll see Photos’ own editing tools – click Extensions at the bottom, and pick More if you don‘t see your app’s extensions in the list; this takes you to the System Preferences’ Extensions pane and shows all the photo-editing ones on your Mac. Check the boxes of those you want to use.
In Affinity Photo’s case, Extensions work in two different ways: most of them make tools from Affinity Photo available directly within Photos’ interface. The ‘Edit in’ one, though, passes your image to Affinity Photo so you can use its full toolset. The edited version is reimported into Photos when you save and close it.