Does anyone know of any tools to help find duplicate videos in the OS Photos app? I have used a couple of different duplicate photos applications to clean up the pictures in my library, but I know I have a lot of duplicate videos as well. The videos aren't all tagged the same either, making it impossible to visually compare them.
MacBook Air (2020 or later)
Hi
DO NOT go into the originals folder and start changing what is in there. DO NOT allow any app to do that either. You WILL damage your library, and potentially stop it working altogether, leaving you with a nightmare to access all your photos.
If you want to do this external to photos, then:
1 - BACKUP YOUR LIBRARY
Then:(in the photos app)
Hi
DO NOT go into the originals folder and start changing what is in there. DO NOT allow any app to do that either. You WILL damage your library, and potentially stop it working altogether, leaving you with a nightmare to access all your photos.
If you want to do this external to photos, then:
1 - BACKUP YOUR LIBRARY
Then:(in the photos app)
Hi
Do NOT use any app that deletes directly from the library structure. (Originals folder). The library structure is not intended for user access which is why it is hidden by default.
They will damage your library, potentially up to and including losing access to all your images.
There are no apps that I'm aware of that will compare videos frame by frame. Pretty much the best you can hope for is a comparison of filename/filesize, and other metadata such as it exists for vidoes.
As Leonie mentioned, if you are looking for similar videos that differ by resolution or frame rate rather than an exact or true duplicate with the same file size, etc then a manual search is going to be the best solution using smart albums to try and group similar items together.
You should also look at your workflow to understand why you are getting the duplicates in the first place. It is best to stick to just one method of importing files to Photos - either direct import from a device or iCloud, don't try and use both. Photos is not very good at identifying a duplicate file that has been imported directly from your phone and is also sync'd to iCloud even if the filename, size, etc are all the same.
Power Photos by Fat Cat software is generally considered to be the best Photos utility. The documentation refers to photos but I see no reason why the functions do not work on videos as well - download the free version and give it a go.
Do be careful using other 'duplicate tools' as many of them can corrupt your library.
The only other utility generally recommended by users on this forum is Photo Sweeper, but I do not have any experience of this, but worth a look as well.
The best duplicate finder would be yourself.
It looks like you want to remove similar videos, not just exact duplicates. When removing similar items you have to compare them anyway and pick the best one. You will want to keep the best version of the video - the version with the best resolution and the most stable one, the one, where the people or animals are looking the best, where the sound is the best. No program will be able to do that for you.
To weed out videos I would create a smart album in Photos with the rule "Photo is video"; then sort the videos by the capture date, so videos taken at the same time will appear side-by-side. Then watch them and delete any video clip that I do not like. Make a backup copy of your library, before you start removing items on a large scale.
Which version of Photos are you using? Photos 5 and Photos 6 are scanning the library for similar and duplicate images and videos. But this is only used for the "curated" views in the "Days". In the "Days" only our favourites are show, and Photos is suppressing similar items. If you collect all items of a day in an album, you will have a starting point, which items to keep and which to remove as potentially redundant items.
The only problem I am having with Photos selection for the "Days" is, that it is usually picking the worst version as the keeper. My taste is very different.
Thanks Russ, but frankly this doesn't address the issue: I have tried multiple softwares like the one you mentioned and there is nothing that can be easily used to remove duplicate videos (finding duplicate videos is way harder than photos, as a video should be analyzed as sequence of frames).
There are Apps that operate on the Photos App which only find image duplicates (Power Photos, Duplicate Photos Finder, Cisdem duplicate finder etc.) These App have the ability to operate inside the DB of the Photo App, then there are Apps like Gemini and all the Duplicate File finders, which operate on the folder structure, so you could point them to the "original" folder of the Photo App, but the problem with that is the Photo App has a cache of all your photos and videos, and deleting the original doesn't remove the duplicate from the Photo database, but it invalidates (popup error) when you try to edit the photo.
To be fair, I think we should have a solution to 1) easily spot Duplicates as part of the Photos App 2) This should also work on movies because iPhone can capture photos AND videos, so the support for videos in the Photo App should allow users to work seamlessly between the two types of media.
Which version of Photos are you using? If you are using Photos 5 or 6 on macOS 10.15 or later, the "Originals" folder is no longer human readable. Starting from "originals" helped in the older versions of Photos, but in the newer versions it is a mess. Photos is renaming the original files with cryptic filenames when storing them in the library. If you just use the original files, you will lose the original filenames and cannot even sort the videos any longer by sorting them according to the filename. You may want to export the originals as unmodified originals, so Photos will at least recreate the original filenames.
Yeah, thanks for the answers, but none of them addresses the issue that Photos doesn't have a built in function to remove duplicate videos (either if same identical file with different file names or dates, or similar items such as different resolutions). No one sane in mind is going to go through 365,000 items marked with different dates to spot duplicates. I'm not going to be rude, but computers should allow to not to do manual tasks such as identifying duplicates in a library.
Furthermore I get that removing originals form the Photos.app is not good, as matter of fact you will have to remove the library, as the photos are cached and there is no way to remove them by refreshing or rebuilding the library.
The only way I see now is to take the original folder out, then use a duplicate finder like Gemini and then create a new Photo library. 🤢
Does anyone have a better idea ?
Hi Tony,
I am going into the ORIGINAL folder and find all the duplicates (which are hashed, but is ok), then remove the duplicates and throw away that library and reimport everything into a new system library.
It's faster than your method and exporting unmodified original is redundant if you don't care about the file names.
What would you say is the problem in doing this, apart simplifying the overall process ?
Filenames is the biggest problem - but I thought you were only duplicate finding videos. What about all the thousands of photos you will throw away when you trash the library? (365000 items?). Plus all the work you have done cataloguing and editing those items?
Further, export unmodified originals will be just about as quick as copying the originals folder, and you can easily just export the videos.
And under APFS exporting unmodified originals doesn't take up any extra disk space. Also, if you use the Originals file you will have to go into each of the subfolders that Photos has created as well and copy from these subfolders.
PS - if you want to give feedback to apple regarding any features you feel photos should have, this is the place to do it:
find duplicate videos in the OS Photos app
