what settings for photos to avoid duplicates, triplicates and etc.

Mike,

what are the Settings for the Camera on your iPhone?

You can see, if your iPhone is taking the photos and videos in the space saving HEIF format or as JPEGs in the

• Settings > Camera
• Tap "Formats".

If the format is set to "High Efficiency" you are shooting HEIC, if it is set to "Most compatible"; the format will be JPEG.

HEIC has the advantage of a better compression needing only half the amount of storage compared too a JPEG of the same quality. Frankly, I am not sure, if My Photo Stream can handle HEIC at all. The support page for My Photo Stream (My Photo Stream - Apple Support) is only stating these formats as supported:

"My Photo Stream supports JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and most RAW photo formats. My Photo Stream doesn't support video or Live Photos. ...

Tony, do you know, how My Photo Stream is handling HEIC, if at all?

So I would switch the Format in the Settings of the camera to "Most compatible". You would then be shooting JPEGs, And My Photo Stream does not need to convert the files. They will arrive on your Mac in the same format as on your iPhone.

If you want to keep the space saving HEIC format an your iPhone and Mac make sure that the Settings > Photos : Transfer to Mac or PC are set as described by Tony to "Keep original".

If you are still getting duplicates, tell us please, if they are exact duplicates. Compare the format , the filename and the filename extension, the pixel size. Whenever I enabled My Photo Stream on my iPhone, I got plenty of duplicates with cryptic filenames and a smaller pixel size, because My Photo Stream has been uploading the photos from my Mac to the iPhone as smaller files with cryptic names. And occasionally these smaller copies got downloaded back to my Mac.

Hi there tourswag,

We understand that you would like to sync your photos across all your devices and are seeing duplicate photos on your Mac. We’d like to help however we can.

To confirm, are you using iCloud Photos on your devices or are you using My Photo Stream? Are you seeing these duplicates on your iPhone as well?

• Set up and use iCloud Photos
• My Photo Stream

Let’s also follow the steps outlined here to see if the issue with duplicate photos continues:

How to use the Photos Repair Library on your Mac

Cheers!

Are you using My Photo Stream or iCloud Photos , or both?

Do use only one of the services. Using several services together is asking for trouble. Use either my Photo Stream or iCloud Photos or the manual import, but do not mix the methods.

Avoid a format conversion when syncing the photos. For example, if your iPhone camera is using the space-saving High Efficiency format HEIF, do not use the automatic conversion to "Most Compatible" when transferring the photos to the Mac, but transfer them as HEIC files and not JPEG files. The conversion can result in an endless duplication loop with my Photo Stream.

Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices - Apple Support

Look in your phone settings

Photos>transfer to PC.

Set this to "Keep original" rather than "Automatic". This will prevent the conversion of HEIC format to JPG when transferring to your mac.

Also use ONLY one method to transfer. Either iCloud OR Photostream OR USB. Do not mix them.

Hi mike same issue

i have 2 lakh photos 7000 videos

do not know how to remove duplicates

also 2tb iCloud storage is full

no further option available now