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Is there a way to see what albums a photo are in?

I found a lot of my older pictures have duplicated up to five times(!), most of them with varying file sizes, some exactly the same.


It's relatively easy to compare and delete them manually, but I need to know which one of the duplicates are in an album in order to not deleting a picture from an album without replacing it with the copy I choose to keep.


Is it possible to see in the main list which albums a picture is placed in?

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.13

Posted on Mar 8, 2020 10:42 PM

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Posted on Mar 10, 2020 2:47 PM

A few minutes after my last reply it struck me how to do this;


  1. Give all pics already in albums a common keyword (i.e. "Album")
  2. When looking through the duplicates in the main library, it's easy to identify which versions of the pics are used in albums.


So thanks for your tip about third party software, but this one I solved myself :)

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 10, 2020 2:47 PM in response to Old Toad

A few minutes after my last reply it struck me how to do this;


  1. Give all pics already in albums a common keyword (i.e. "Album")
  2. When looking through the duplicates in the main library, it's easy to identify which versions of the pics are used in albums.


So thanks for your tip about third party software, but this one I solved myself :)

Mar 9, 2020 7:17 AM in response to PukingPope

Photos for mac does not have a command to show which albums a photo is in. That is why I create most of my albums as smart albums, based on a keyword named like the album. For example, I have an album with pictures of lighthouses. This album is created as a smart album with the rule "Keyword is Lighthouse". While viewing the photo I can open the info and check, which keywords are applied. If the keyword "lighthouse" is missing, I can add he keyword with a simple keyclick and the photo has been added to the smart album.

In the earlier versions of Photos we could run a script, to find the albums a photo is in. this does no longer work well in Catalina, if the albums are in subfolders:

How to find out the albums a photo is in: Jacques Rioux's Script, version 2019

Mar 9, 2020 4:27 PM in response to PukingPope

To safely identify duplicates 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. 


I've run tests on the following apps with these results:


PhotoSweeper - $9.99 - Demo version available. 


PowerPhotos - $29.95  


PowerPhotos is the iPhoto Library Manager version for Photos and is very powerful. Although more expensive I would recommend it as it has more capabilities than the others like the capability to merge Photos libraries or copy photos along with their metadata between libraries.


PhotoSweeper compares bitmaps and/or histograms so it can detect duplicate images even if they have different file sizes, file names, image sizes and capture dates.


Both of these are safe to use on a library as with each it's the user's final say in deleting the files or not.


Also as long as one has backups of their drive, i.e. with Time Machine or other backup app, a damaged library can be restored from the backup made just prior to the damage occurring.


Mar 9, 2020 1:44 PM in response to léonie

Well, I use Catalina, and my albums are in subfolders. Also, I'm skeptical about running scripts og third-party software as there is a lot of work at stake if it should corrupt my library.


Smart albums is of a good solution, but they don't show up in my Apple TV 4K application.


A smart album would present ALL pics from a period, so I would have to pick out which ones I'd like to present in a final album by giving them a keyword like "2018", then create a new smart album with Date between x and x + keyword is.


Might be a good way to do this, but would be a great deal of work just to be able to delete duplicates avoiding deleting the one that is in an album


Stupid Apple! >:(

Is there a way to see what albums a photo are in?

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