Photos Duplicates

...you still must be able to locate them in the Photos Library to permanently eliminate them, right?

No. Right-clicking on an image in any album, anywhere, with the Command key pressed changes the Remove from Album option to a Delete option. The photo is put into the Recently Deleted folder in one step.

There are two apps with good reputation for finding duplicates in Photos app.

• PowerPhotos compares metadata and has other functions.
• PhotoSweeper finds duplicates by comparing histograms, what’s on the image.

Both of the above apps are safe to use with Photos and both are compatible with current macOS versions.

What you should stay away from are general-purpose “cleaning” and “de-duplicating” apps. Those apps do not understand how Photos database works and can corrupt the library.

In any case, you should always make a fresh backup before undertaking any major work on Photos library.

A second thumbs up from me for Power Photos.

Power Photos has a really good duplicate feature where it identifies all the duplicates and you can set the rules as to which ones to keep (i.e. the most recent edited version, the largest file size, etc) and you can also manually override the choices where necessary (e.g. where you want to keep 2 versions of the same photo because one is colour and one is black and white). Only once you are happy with the duplicates to be kept/deleted do you press a button and the software does all of the deleting for you.

Avoid the auto delete programs as the earlier person recommended.

Never been sure about MacPaw stuff, it gets some good reviews but always seems to be associated with spam ware and people have difficulty when it comes to removing the software.

Never used. No one here recommends it. As far as I know, it uses the same engine as MacPaw’s general purpose “cleaner” app, which is definitely a NO.