From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

Finding and installing photo extensions - Photos for OS X Tutorial

From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

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Finding and installing photo extensions

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- We mentioned extensions before, but they're quite versatile, and I'd like to take a look at some specific extensions. Let's start, though, by showing you how to find new extensions. If you have used other photo editing platforms, you might refer to these as plugins. What you can do is inside of Photos for macOS, if you're under Edit, you'll notice that there is a plugin menu here, and this allows you to access built-in ones that you've activated. You can also choose to go directly to the App Store. This'll take you to an article, and inside of it are several recommended extensions that Apple has tested and likes. You're welcome to try these out, but there are certainly more than this. My suggestion is that you just type in Photos extensions. Doing so will let you easily browse and find additional choices. I'm going to download this one called External Editors, which allows me to target different applications for editing. And click Open. You'll see, for example, that I can now choose other applications on my system that I want to use as an editor. We'll talk about that more in just a moment. You can continue to browse others that have been tagged as extensions, choosing to install or update any of these on your system so they're readily available and you can use them. You may also notice some apps that you've already purchased or installed, and not realized that they've had an extension. Once you've got through this, I suggest you go to the System Preferences and click on the Extensions tab. Here, you'll see all of your extensions, including ones for different applications in Finder. Choose the one called Photos Editing, and you can select which ones you want to use. Now, it's very easy to check to enable any particular ones. And you can scroll through all the ones you have installed on your system as well. When you're ready, you can now return to Photos for macOS. There's no need to relaunch the application. Now, with the Mac App Store model, the benefit is, is that you know that the extensions will seamlessly integrate. You can find a wealth of photo editing applications that allow you to extend Photos for macOS. So you can use Photos for macOS as an organizer, but take advantage of more additional editing tools and specialty effects. You also may find that some of the photo software you've already purchased or have from other places also includes extensions, and if so, it'll appear under that Extensions category in System Preferences. All right, let's put this to work.

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