Repeatedly imports old photos over and over again...

When I connect my iPhone to my MacBook, Photos suggests to import "new objects". As both devices are synced against iCloud and always updated by the minute, it's pretty annoying. The logic thing to do, is to do as Photos suggest, but only resulting in a massive amount of duplicates. Just a few of them is in the heic-format. When I discovered this at some point I had accumulated thousands of duplicates in Photos, some files with up to 10 duplicates. On top of that, most duplicates had great differences in file sizes, and many with meta data in one/some of the files. **** of a job to clean up....

I actually did an import of all 7000+ suggested files into a new album in Photos, then deleted all of them, and thought that would solve the issue. Well, no, Photos still suggests importing 3200 files.

I don't think clean installing either my iPhone or MacBook or even both would solve it either, but if anyone has done this and thus solved the problem, please tell!

When faced with a button that says, "Import all New Items" one should be safe to assume that it will in fact ONLY "Import all New Items". I notice today after plugging in my Ip[hone, and unlocking the iPhone that my Mac goes right to an import screen that, in addition to showing me my new photos, shows a vast amount of others, many of which are duplicates on-screen in the same window...Why this is not a priority for Apple to fix is beyond me. I have several reasons to want to hurry the moving of my new photos into my mac via a wire, e.g. not burning cell data, having a bad wifi signal, and being focussed on using the photos I've just taken for a report that needs to get done, without waiting for an indeterminate time while the Cloud does it's pokey thing. If Apple knows this is a broken process and can't be fixed, for Gods sake Apple just give us a button that says "please select the photos you wish to import" then let it do exactly that. This is sick. leaving a process in place that slowly bloats and cripples my photos collection. And here I am whining about the unexplained madness of it all instead of doing the report that I should be doing now...

Are you using iCloud Photos on your iPhone? Then you simply cannot import automatically all photos that are shown as new, because the duplicate detection does no longer work, when you your iPhone is downloading photos from iCloud. You will have to select the new photos manually and only import selected photos, where you are sure they are new.

Another possible source of duplicates is the format conversion, if you are taking the photos in the space saving Heic format, but are importing them as jpegs. In that case you need to select the new photos manually for import as well.

Fatkoala wrote:

Im using icloud but the storage is full so its not backing up automatically.......

If you are using iCloud Photos and "Optimise Storage" for iCloud photos, you must not import photos manually from the iPhone. The manual import and the syncing with iCloud have not been designed to work together. The duplicate detection on import will only check for exactly identical files, not for different versions of the same file. When your iPhone is downloading the same file from iCloud over and over again, the new download may have a different creation date will be treated as new files.

Download your photos from iCloud on a computer to save them, then try to free storage on your iPhone. As long as your iCloud Storage is full, iCloud will stop working properly.