The count of photos and videos contained in the respective Photos libraries of both my iPhone and iMac are identical. When I select my iPhone in the side bar of iMac Photos, why does it indicate there are 5650 photos to be be imported?
Probably you have setting on iPhone photos (under transfer to PC) set to Automatic, rather than “Keep Original” This will convert HEIC images to JPG as they are transferred to your mac.
These JPG images are then not the same as the HEIC images, and are not recognised as duplicates, so will be reimported. This is the most common way people manage to create many duplicates in their photos library.
Probably you have setting on iPhone photos (under transfer to PC) set to Automatic, rather than “Keep Original” This will convert HEIC images to JPG as they are transferred to your mac.
These JPG images are then not the same as the HEIC images, and are not recognised as duplicates, so will be reimported. This is the most common way people manage to create many duplicates in their photos library.
That sounds like the problem I'm having. So, if I understand correctly, by switching to "Keep Original" on iPhone/Photos, new photos will only be uploaded in the HEIC format going forward.
If so, do you know of any way to weed out and/or segregate the duplicate photos in the Mac Photos library?
Hi - the jpg format will only be on the phone if you have used iCloud to sync photos back, as well as USB to get the jpg files to the mac in the first place (ICloud sync will only sync the originals, and doesn’t convert images.
To get rid of duplicates, you can either use a smart album to identify just the jpg files from your phone (assuming you have all the original HEIC files now trnasferred and haven’t deleted them from your phone after transfer to the mac), and delete them.
Alternatively use one of the suggested (round here) apps to remove duplicates - power photos or photo sweeper.
One other question: will the same photos in the iPhone Photos library, i.e. the JPG images, be repeatedly imported to the Mac Photos each time?
When I select my iPhone in the side bar of Mac Photos, why does it indicate there are 5650 photos to be be imported?
