Duplicate Photos Macbook

[Elly Garnand]

Youcan easily remove duplicate photos and videos from your library. Duplicates appear automatically in the Duplicates album in the sidebar. (Depending on the size of your library, duplicates may take some time to appear as Photos analyzes your photos.)

One original photo or video appears where the selected duplicates were located in your library. Deleted duplicates appear in the Recently Deleted album, where you can recover or permanently delete them.

However, I'd urge extreme caution using that feature as it seems to have nearly destroyed my library recently. I had tens of thousands of duplicates from corruption to the library, probably due to iCloud bugs, and the merge feature mostly deleted the wrong copies of photos. Thank heaven for undelete.

By "wrong" I mean given two jpegs with the same dimensions/pixel count it would often delete the far larger version and keep the smaller (presumably far more compressed, lower quality) version. I spent several hours on the phone with supposedly high-level creative media support reps and no one could/would tell me what Apple means by "higher quality" which Merge supposedly preserves, except that the last rep insisted that if two files had the same number of pixels they had to be the same quality, even if one is much more compressed/smaller, which is dangerously false information. (Dangerous at least if you care much for family photos.) It's possible there's some other variable that affects quality in jpegs but no one could suggest anything and simply insisted on mathematically impossible answers.

Also, this is partly a matter of preference but given two equal-pixel images Merge seems always to keep the *newest* dated copy rather than the oldest, no matter how small/compressed the file (not a matter of preference). If like me you often back-date scans or emailed photos to match the time they were taken this is not a good feature. I'm not sure when anyone would want to keep the newer but worse-quality version of a file.

Based on phone support Apple might repeat here "but we keep higher quality"--*maybe*, but they owe us an answer to what they mean by "quality", and none has ever been offered except "more pixels" (or HEIC format), which is insane. (I should add, some support reps were outstanding and rebuilt my corrupt library but couldn't fully fix it.)

Sorry, probably more info than you want to know and should probably be it's own post. But I'd check carefully what Photos proposes to merge if you use that feature. And be sure to keep (and backup) full-size copies of all photos on your computer outside the Photos app because like all apps this one has bugs, and some are pretty awful. I'm still recovering from this snafu, two years on, but think I'll finish dealing with it soon.

Your current version, Photos 7 on Monterey, is also scanning for duplicates and similar photos, but does not yet offer the detected duplicates in a Duplicates album for removal, like Photos 8 on Ventura is doing. Photos 7 is only using the duplicate detection to keep duplicates and similar photos out of sight in the curated layout on the Library > Days view. You could use the Days as a starting point to look for duplicates. All items you are not seeing in the Days are potential candidates for duplicates or redundant, similar photos. Just toggle between the "Days "and "All Photos" to see the additional photos that are omitted in the Days.

You could also use a smart album to find the photos, that have been omitted in the days. Select all photos in the days, then add all selected photos to a new album "Curated" (File > New album with selection).

Now create a new smart album "File > New Smart Album), and set the rule to "Album is not Curated". You may want to add a date range, if you only selected the photos from a particular month or year. Combine both rules with "Match all". You could also add a rule "Photo is not Favorite" to protect your favorite photos. Or "Photo is not screenshot", as all screenshots are suppressed in the Days view.

You want an app that will identify the potential duplicates, put them in an album or mark them with a keyword for easy retrieval and deletion by you. You don't want one that does the deletion itself for obvious reasons.

Sorry, my post has been not quite clear. In my example the "Curated" in the Album rule is not an option, but the name of the album, where I added all photos photos from the "Days". You could use any name for the album, where you collect the photos from the "Days". I need this album, so I can check with a smart album, which photos are not shown in the Days, because they are redundant.

See my long reply--I have a huge library (currently 76k, should be 45k-ish) and have spent two years dealing with duplicates. If many pics are important to you I'd recommend spending some time working out a plan to figure out which copies to delete, and really like Photosweeper, but that one takes some thought b/c you choose exactly what criteria to use to delete duplicates (like smaller file, newer date, etc.). Ventura's Merge is v easy but has serious limitations. Good luck!

I'm running MacOS Sonoma 14.1 and have this problem. I've left the mac running with no activity and photos running for several nights. There is no folder/album labeled duplicates. There MUST be a way to tell photos to run a deduplication. If not, big short coming in the product. Any ideas?

Look at the status bar below "All Photos". Are there any items shown as unable to upload or "On this Mac only"? Such items can block the analysis of your library and prevent the Duplicate detection from running. They need to be removed from the library and converted to a more compatible format.

No, I don't have "Unable to upload" photos. Neither I have Shared Albums turned on. Maybe the problem is thay I recently aded a lot of photos to my library? And they are still being uploaded to iC right now.

If you like to collect memories, you probably shoot a lot of photos. Over time, most of your hard drive is taken over by pictures. Now, try to imagine how many of them are duplicate photos or just really similar? Chances are, the answer is a lot, and they occupy that valuable space that, unfortunately, is finite.

First, you need to find duplicate photographs in your gallery. Then, you have to figure out which version to delete in each case. All that takes loads of time if done manually, and Gemini 2 does 90% of the work for you.

Deleting duplicate photos on a Mac can be done manually or with tools that automate the process. Whichever method you choose, finding and removing these unneeded files can be a great way to quickly free up disk space on your Mac.

Staying on top of duplicates is important if you want to prevent useless files from eating up valuable drive space. Whether you choose to do it manually or using software, make a habit of deleting these junk files from your Mac.

In previous versions of macOS, relying on your Mac to automatically track down duplicate photos in your Photo Library wasn't an option, and if you wanted to purge your library of duplicates you had to download a third-party app.

Inside the Duplicates album are any duplicates listed in chronological order, with a Merge option beside each set. You can click this button to merge duplicate sets into an individual photo. Even if you take two photos together that are very similar, Apple's merging feature will intelligently keep the highest detail and the most metadata, creating the best possible image.

MacRumors attracts a broad audience of both consumers and professionals interested in the latest technologies and products. We also boast an active community focused on purchasing decisions and technical aspects of the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and other Apple platforms.

1. Back up your Mac using Time Machine. It goes without saying that the first step to any process that could see data deleted is to use Time Machine to back up your Mac. Make sure your Photos library is included as part of the backup.

Eventually, when going back to that Duplicates folder it was populated. On my writing machine, that took half a day. On the Mac mini housing our family digital photo library, the first duplicates showed up after a few hours but it was the better part of a day before the process seemed to have wrapped up. The point is you need to be patient and trust that something is happening in the background.

6. Smart merging of exact copies. As you scroll through the list of duplicates, for each group you will be required to give the okay for Photos to get rid of the extras. In the case of exact copies, Photos will merge the files in case some have superior metadata, creating a single version with the highest quality and maximum metadata.

7. In some cases, Photos will find photos or videos that appear to be the same, but are not exact copies. One might be a higher resolution version, for example. Photos will merge the files, again creating one copy with the highest quality while retaining the maximum metadata.

Any duplicate photos or videos are subsequently moved to the Recently Deleted folder where you have the opportunity to rescue them. Randomly scanning through the thousands of duplicate photos that were removed from my writing laptop and our family Photos library, I was unable to spot any instances where Photos deleted a superior copy.

Over time, duplicate photos can accumulate in the Photos app and folders on your Mac. They can take up storage space and lead to clutter and disorganization. The most efficient way to get rid of them is to use a duplicate photo finder or cleaner, a type of software designed to automatically identify duplicate photos and quickly remove duplicates.

3a8082e126