PhotoCore 1.9: find, isolate, pick, export
The problem it solves: you searched, you found forty good photos, and now you want to work on just those and take them out of the app. Version 1.9 freezes the selection, turns Picks into a filter, exports copies with the star written into their metadata, and explains all of it in a guide inside the app. This release comes from an App Store review.
Last updated: 2 September 2026 · PhotoCore 1.9
Isolate the selection
You searched "a cat in a tree", got forty results and want to work on twelve. Select them and press cmd-Return: the gallery shows only those, and a glass bar at the top tells you how many. Inside, everything works as usual: filters, Picks, Compare, Quick Look.
Select a subset and press cmd-Return again to narrow. To leave: cmd-Return with nothing selected, the Exit button, or Esc. The first Esc deselects, the second exits, as you'd expect. The isolation ends on its own when you change folder or run a new search, because it belonged to that result.
Picks you can see, not just set
In the gallery just press P, or the period if you come from Photos. With several photos selected it marks them all; if they're all Picks already, it unmarks them. A Picks chip appears in the filter bar with the number in view: click it to see only those, and the number always matches what you'll see.
In the isolation bar, Mark all as Picks saves the result of your work in one go. That's the full loop: search, isolate the candidates, compare in groups of four, mark with keys 1 to 4 or with P, turn on the Picks filter, export.
Export, with the star in the metadata
With a selection, Export copies the photos to a folder you choose, or saves a CSV list with name, date, camera, location, quality and Pick, ready for Numbers and Excel. You see how many photos and how much space before starting, and if the disk doesn't have enough room, we say so. Copies are identical to the originals and nothing is ever overwritten: if a file is already there, the copy is called name 2.
Copies of your Picks get five stars, the xmp:Rating value that Lightroom, Capture One and Bridge read. For JPEG, PNG and TIFF the star goes inside the file without recompressing anything; for HEIC and RAW, into an .xmp file next to the copy. Originals are left untouched: PhotoCore never modifies your photos, and this version is no exception.
PhotoCore Help and search suggestions
From the Help menu, or with cmd-?, the guide opens: eight sections in English, Italian and Spanish on how search works, writing a good search, threshold and results, scope and filters, indexing, Picks and compare, keyboard shortcuts, privacy. In the Settings panes there's a "?" button that opens the right page directly.
Under the empty search field, your recent searches and six examples to try appear: click one and watch what happens. When you're not typing, the field suggests what to search for on its own. Recent searches stay on your Mac and clear in one click.
More new features and fixes
- The similarity threshold is no longer a bare number: it says Balanced, Precise or Broad, with a line underneath about what changes. The maximum number of results now says it's a ceiling, not a filter, the most common confusion among semantic search apps.
- Next to the search controls, the line that matters: search runs on your Mac, nothing leaves. If you configured a remote language model, the pane tells you what it receives.
- From the context menu you can add the "PhotoCore ★" Finder tag to photos, and remove it. Picks show up in Finder and Spotlight without opening PhotoCore; any tags you already had stay exactly where they were. On export, if you like, on the copies too.
- Anyone opening PhotoCore for the first time finds Pro mode, with the filter bar and the search scope already there. If you had chosen Easy, you stay in Easy.
- The Help menu item now actually opens something. Every new shortcut is in its command's tooltip and on the Keyboard shortcuts page of the guide.
- Every new label speaks English, Italian and Spanish from day one.
Features in this release
Try it with 200 photos, free
Download PhotoCore Light, search for something, select the good results and press cmd-Return. Then export: your Picks land in Lightroom with the star already set.