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duplicate photos on my mac

I am seeing a .jpg and .heic for most of my photos.


Isn't this taking up storage on my hard drive?


Can't I just save my photos in .jpg?


Is there an easy way to find and delete the duplicates?

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 30, 2020 3:23 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Dec 31, 2020 11:36 AM

First select the standard jpeg on your iPhone as the format to take:




As long as you're NOT using iCloud Photos you can use 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 these two apps with the following results and found them to be safe to use:


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, both original and edited versions, along with their metadata between libraries.


PhotoSweeper - $9.99 - Demo version available.


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.



4 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Dec 31, 2020 11:36 AM in response to derreeg

First select the standard jpeg on your iPhone as the format to take:




As long as you're NOT using iCloud Photos you can use 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 these two apps with the following results and found them to be safe to use:


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, both original and edited versions, along with their metadata between libraries.


PhotoSweeper - $9.99 - Demo version available.


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.



Dec 30, 2020 10:32 PM in response to derreeg

Sounds like these photos were taken on an iPhone.

How are you transferring your photos from your iPhone to your Mac? (Examples would include iCloud Photos, My Photo Stream, and transfer using a Lightning-to-USB cable.)

In particular, are you trying to use more than one transfer/sync mechanism on the same photos? That can result in the specific kind of duplication you are seeing.

Dec 31, 2020 10:21 AM in response to markwmsn

I use Photo Stream so I can see the last 1000 photos on all my devices.


In addition, a few times a year, I backup photos and video from my iPhone to my iMac using the lightning cable.


I guess this is resulting in duplicate photos with .jpg and .heic. Any advice on how to locate and delete the duplicate photos? I prefer keeping the .jpg files since they are more easily shared.

duplicate photos on my mac

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