Hi,

My name is Anders and I'm the CEO of Brattoo Propaganda Software. In my last newsletter I wrote about consolidating your photos into one library and about our new application Photos Finder. Releasing new software always results in feedback, feature requests and bug reports! I will try to address them in this newsletter. I hope that you will find this interesting.

Take care and stay safe.

Photos Finder – a short retrospect

For those of you who missed my last newsletter I would like to shortly describe what Photos Finder is. I get a lot of questions about consolidating photos into one library and it is quite possibly the number one request in my 1 on 1 Training Sessions. Therefore, we developed Photos Finder which does exactly this. Photos Finder will scan one or many folders (or drives) of your choice and import the contents in batches, so that Photos does not crash or hang caused by too large imports. It will avoid system folders and small files, keeping your library as clean as possible. It can also import photos and videos sent to you by the Mail.app or Messages.app.

Photos Finder and the Photos duplicate dialog box

Photos Finder finds photos and imports them in small batches to Photos. However, this also means that the Photos duplicate detection gets activated for each batch, which might get really frustrating if you import large numbers of images, resulting in many batches.

For each batch you might have to check the checkbox “Apply to all duplicates” and click on “Don’t import”. Highly frustrating, and we will get that. So, we found a solution and created a new small app Photos Clicker (free of charge). Photos Clicker will look out for those dialog boxes in Photos and automatically check the “Apply for all duplicates” checkbox and click on “Don’t import” and all of the sudden everything is automatic!

So why did we make this a stand alone application and not build it into Photos Finder? I can think of other occasions where you might want the Photos import to automatically avoid duplicates, and in that case it can be accomplished with our small free tool that takes care of this. You can download Photos Clicker today from https://free.brattoo.com

Photos Finder – more improvements

We received some reports of Photos Finder hanging and running slow when encountering folders with lots of photos. That has been taken care of and Photos Finder v1.1.0 is up to 900% faster than the initial version! We also had some reports that Photos Finder suddenly stopped scanning folders and has also been taken care of. So if you haven’t downloaded and tried the latest version of Photos Finder you can get it from https://brattoo.com/photosfinder.

Photos Finder – features to come?

We have received some interesting requests on features such as one from Rick in New Mexico. Rick asked if it would be possible to have Photos Finder convert the imported photos from JPEG to HEIC before importing to Photos? This would keep the library as small as possible. It is a really interesting idea and we are looking at it. If you want to know more about the benefits with HEIC you can read about it an a previous newsletter.

If you have ideas or feature requests for Photos Finder, let me know by replying to this email.

Photos and the built in duplicate detection

I have previously written about the new duplicate detection in Photos 8, and that there seem to be some flaws in the built in detection. While developing Photos Clicker, we noticed another strange thing which indicates that there seems to be a bug in Photos built in duplicate detection, on import as well. When importing photos to the Photos application, the Photos duplicate detection sometimes detects photos as duplicates while they are not. We have noticed this bug in both Photos 7 and 8 and it is good to be aware of this. 

Photos Finder – extended early bird offer

Photos Finder will be priced at $12.95 USD but as we see the current economic situation in the world we have decided to extend our early bird offer, selling it at $7.95 USD for a limited period of time.

Photos – People and two often missed features

In my 1 on 1 Training Sessions I often encourage my customers to start using the People section in Photos. For those of you who do use it, I would like to tell you about two often missed features/functions.

The first, is what to do with photos where the wrong person has been assigned. Wrongly assigned people mess up the algorithms that try to detect new faces and we don’t want that. So, if you are in a certain person’s view in the people section, and find a photo which should not be there, right click on it and select, “Name is not in this photo”. This is often missed but helps a lot when training the face detection algorithms.

The second hint is both about people and memories. Sometimes, for some reason, you might want a certain person to not appear over and over again in your memories section. I recently had a 1 on 1 Training Session with a customer who had just had a divorce, and didn’t want his ex-wife to appear in memories. In those cases you can navigate to that person in the People section and scroll down to the very bottom, there you will find the button, “Feature Name Less”.

 

1 on 1 training sessions

It is indeed great fun to meet you guys in my 1 on 1 training sessions. If you haven’t tried, it but feel that it might be something for you, please feel free to email me. The training sessions can be about anything and will be customized based on your requests. I have over 25 years of experience in the Mac platform, I have been an Apple Solution Expert and have held training in various software over the years. Training sessions are on request by contacting me at training@brattoo.com. Each session is 1 hour and costs 79 USD. If you want to learn more about something, email me at training@brattoo.com and we’ll work out a session just for you.

The free apps section

As I have mentioned in previous letters we have received requests on how to automate some tasks in Apple Photos or tasks related to photos. Those tasks might be tedious to work out manually but are easy for us to solve. The apps include a tool to set the Photos Titles based on the filename (with or without file extension), a tool to copy and apply GPS coordinates between photos, a tool to copy XMP sidecars to image files and finally a utility to set the correct file dates on image files based on the photo date stored in the metadata within the image files. You’ll find all our free apps at https://free.brattoo.com.

This newsletter and previous letters

Several of our readers have requested that we resend previous emails so that they could catch up on earlier tips and information. All previous emails are available online in our Newsletter section at https://newsletter.brattoo.com

License upgrade - final call?

It was supposed to be the final call for discounted upgrades and we did discontinue it for a short period but received so many requests so we decided to open it up again. After all, we do try to be nice guys.

For only $4.95 you can upgrade any old Duplicate Annihilator license to Duplicate Annihilator for Photos and for just three dollars($3.00) more you can upgrade any old Duplicate Annihilator license to the Duplicate Annihilator Toolbox including a family pack! This means that you get five licenses for you and your family for all versions of Duplicate Annihilator including iPhoto, Aperture, iOS and Photos for only $7.95.

Get the upgrade from: https://upgrade.brattoo.com

Support the creation of these newsletters by becoming a Patreon!

If you enjoy these newsletters and want to support the creation of them, then please consider becoming a monthly contributor by signing up to become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/brattoo. Patreons will get access to my monthly zoom get together where we can ask questions and learn new things related to Photos and Duplicate Annihilator.

Thank you for your time, I hope that you found this email informative. If you have any feedback, suggestions, questions or ideas then please reply to this email. I read all emails and reply to them in person. And, don't forget to stay safe.

Best Regards,
Anders, CEO and Founder, Brattoo Propaganda Software