Detect/sort/remove duplicate photos in entire collection as well as shared album

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Level 1

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Detect/sort/remove duplicate photos in entire collection as well as shared album

I have many shared albums with my wife, where we add picture of our son - since i never know which the last picture i uploaded was (or if i missed any in the middle) i always select an overlap of photos when adding to the album, thinking apples software is smart enough to say "picture already exists, i'll skip this one"; this does not appear to be the case.

Questions 1: is there an easy way to detect/delete duplicate photos or videos in shared albums? or even list by filename or date so i can do it manually?

Side note: default sort is by date, but its not accurate, i still find 2 photos which are the exact same divided by 10 other photos in the middle. somehow...

Question 2: Is there a way to detect/delete duplicates in the entire photo collection (yes i also have the tendency to download duplicate family photos from the internet, and now i have multiples)

The year is 2020, we are finally able to compare file-size, file-name, and even date/time a picture/video was taken, we also have the ability to compare an actual picture with another to find a % of potential match - why is a company so advanced such as apple not allowing the most simple features? is it because you can charge more for cloud storage when everyone is paying for duplicates?

I'm sure secretly, in the apple backend, you are running a dedup so you only store these duplicates once, but are still able to charge twice - my thoughts anyways.

Posted on Sep 27, 2020 10:09 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

196,989 points

Sep 27, 2020 11:46 AM in response to seandkendall

Shared albums are shown in your Photos Library for convenience, but are not apart of the library. When you share a photo to a smart album, Photos will create a downsized copy of the photo for the smart album, strip many metadata from the photo and rename it, then upload it to the smart album. When you share the same photo again, it will be added to the album again, because the version in the shared album is different from the photo you want to share again.

Which version of macOS X and Photos are you currently using?

Photos 5 on Catalina is spending a lot of time with duplicate detection, but currently it is implemented in a somewhat disappointing way. The duplicate detection is only used to hide the duplicates from the view, so we do not longer see them, but they are still there and are taking up storage. There is no way to this to get rid of them. About the Duplicate Detection in Photos 5 - Apple Community

We can try to use the curated view without duplicates as a starting point to look for duplicates. Any item not shown in the curated view is a candidate for a potential duplicate or a boring photo.

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

210,289 points

Sep 27, 2020 11:43 AM in response to seandkendall

Photos is not a paid product. lt's offered free with every Mac sold. An yes PowerPhotos does work with Photos libraries to find and help remove duplicated photos and videos - but only the paid version.

I use both PowerPhoto and Photosweeper X and are the only two I will recommend. PowerPhotos is more powerful, however, in that it can copy photos or albums between libraries while including the metadata. It's also an excellent Photos library viewer in that it has a column view where most of the metadata can be viewed and sorted on. That's available in the free version.

If you're using iCloud Photos and manually importing photos into your library you will get duplicates and Photos wan't always catch them.

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Answer 3

Sep 27, 2020 10:14 AM in response to seandkendall

When you review the import to photos, it will show you a list of photos which have already been imported and a list of new photos. If you tell it to import already imported, then it will happily do that.

Now you have duplicated photos, to find them, you need an external app. The one I use is powerphotos...

https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

It is not free.

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Answer 4

seandkendall Author

Level 1

15 points

Sep 27, 2020 10:27 AM in response to TonyCollinet

What you explained is only partly true. Yes, if you explicitly "import photos" you get the option, for me i like to use the mac shortcuts such as "add to photos", where you don't explicitly need to open iphotos, you'll magically see your photos appear across all devices - keeping in mind , many users out there want to simply add photos from their device such as an iphone, where it will never tell you a photo is a duplicate.

also, the "not-free" software is not supported with apple photos. I personally purchased "Photosweeper X" which is great software, but these third party apps cannot guarantee that they will keep your library in-tact. you may find photos deleted that you thought were a duplicate, but in-fact, you're deleting all copies of the software. this is why apple does not endorse this software.

I'm hoping someone from apple, who is customer obsessed looks at these messages and promotes a product feature rquest, as a paid product should be able to do these simple things.

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Answer 5

Sep 27, 2020 10:36 AM in response to seandkendall

That would be nice - but don't hold your breath

:-)

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Detect/sort/remove duplicate photos in entire collection as well as shared album

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