"All Photos" or "Recents" album view missing in Pixelmator Pro?

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2022-01-09 17:45:50

I'm trying (for the first time in a very long time) to start a project in Pixelmator Photo, using the Photos app image picker. The popup window that allows me to view/select images from the Photos app doesn't seem to off any way to look for images in the "All Photos" or "Recents" albums, and selecting the top level "Photos" item from the sidebar shows a huge list of photos, but it's not actually all photos, none of my recent images are showing up in this view.

Additionally, when trying to view the list of albums, I don't see any option for "All Photos" or "Recents".

Is there any reason Pixelmator Pro doesn't actually show these 2 album views?
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2022-01-12 13:35:25

Is there any chance you're using iCloud Photos and have Optimize Mac Storage turned on in Photos app preferences? If you do, the photos that don't show up are most likely stored in iCloud. You'd have to download them first to be able to access them in the Photos browser. In Photos, you'll see smaller previews of these images. If you open an image and tap Edit, it will be downloaded to your Mac. Or, you can download all images at once by choosing "Download Originals to this Mac" in Photos app preferences.

Generally speaking, we know the current Photos browser is not ideal and that there aren't enough options for image search and sorting. For instance, the images are listed from oldest to newest by default right now. We'd love to make improvements to all these areas in future versions of the Photos browser. In the meantime, to bypass all the current limitations, I'd probably recommend using the Pixelmator Pro extension and working in the Photos app directly.
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2022-01-12 15:31:23

Thank you for the feedback, and yes I'm using Optimize Mac Storage, as my Photos library has grown much too large for my local storage.

One of the primary challenges is that, if all I'm doing are colour adjustments, I do them via Pixelmator Photo on iPad as I much prefer the experience of using the large iPad Pro for image editing.

So when I really need Pixelmator Pro it's because I am planning to do work with additional layers, etc. which are not possible via the extension.

Hopefully the photo browser improvements are on the horizon, for now I'm just having to export any images I want to work on before starting in Pixelmator Pro and then after my final output is ready I add it back to the Photos app.
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2022-01-18 11:55:31

by Fish 2022-01-12 13:31:23 So when I really need Pixelmator Pro it's because I am planning to do work with additional layers, etc. which are not possible via the extension.
But you can work with layers in the Pixelmator Pro Photos extension on a Mac. Is that not working for you? Or, perhaps, you meant something else here?
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2022-01-18 14:35:07

I’ll give that a try! For some reason I thought the extension only allowed limited functionality versus the full application. Thanks for the tip!
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2022-01-21 16:40:56

Yep, almost the entire Pixelmator Pro app is available and an extension in Photos — layer editing included. :raised_hands: