Ventura - how to merge Multiple duplicate photos at once ?

Despite the poor language used on the merge confirmation buttons, it does indeed merge them all separately as you would expect. Cmd + A to select all, then click 'Merge ### Items' and confirm with the popup.

To do what you say—select a range, then click Merge—doesn't that merge all the selected photos into a single photo?

I suspect the OP's situation is similar to mine: I don't have thousands of copies of one photo, but rather exactly two copies of each of thousands of photos. In other words, my Duplicates album looks like this:

[date] Merge 2 items

Photo 1a | Photo 1b

[date] Merge 2 items

Photo 2a | Photo 2b

[date] Merge 2 items

Photo 3a | Photo 3b

…and so forth

I'm under the impression that if I select photos 1a through 3b and say Merge 6 photos, all 6 will become one image in the library, effectively deleting 5 files. That's not what needs to happen in my case.

Instead, I would like a way to say "with all of the photos I've selected, merge each pair separately," so that with a single click, Photos intelligently merges 1a & 1b, then merges 2a & 2b, then 3a & 3b, leaving me with 3 separate photos where once I had 6.

Is there a way to do that sort of batch merging?

you can hold COMMAND-A to select ALL and then do the merge at once.

Are you referring to Bursts where you hold down the shutter button and take mujltiple photos as long as the button is held down?

Bursts only show as a single item in the library. It's when you go to select the frame you want to use that you an see all items in the burst.

For duplicates you can use of of these two apps to identify and group them for quick and easy deletion:

You want 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.

Ventura can detect duplicates but you'll have to delete them on at a time. Not so with these two apps.

yes. I know. 6 of 1 vs half dozen of the other. You can either select them one by one or select all and deselect the ones you dont want to merge.

i had almost 18,000 duplicates…for me i just said eff it and went with the apple logic. Saved me 200 gb on my external photo hard drive and likely cleaned up far better than I ever could. Good luck to you

You can select a range of Duplicates by clicking the first, the holding down the Shift key and clicking the last of the range. And then clicking the blue text "merge ..." for any of the selected images.

But it is risky - if you do not check the duplicates individually before merging them, you might merge images that are not duplicates at all. Occasionally I am seeing groups of duplicates shown, just because the filenames are identical.

None of the four photos shown below are duplicates, just their filenames.

And sometimes the originals are duplicates, but I have created differently cropped versions and want to keep them both. Or I have created differently edited Live Photos, for example a long exposure of a waterfall and a loop version of the same image, where I want to use both.

So I only merge images after checking the suggested duplicates, or I might lose my work or precious originals.

Had same problem. I was finally able to merge a couple of thousand dups by right clicking on one of the photos and selecting merge all. (That is what I remember doing. Nevertheless merging can be done in one step.) Good luck!

Thanks to all for teaching me something new, i.e. the Merge function. Had never see it before nor had to.

I don't think there's any way to batch merge the duplicates. Someone who is proficient in AppleScript might be able to create an app/wortkflow to do it but I'm skeptical. If there were three duplicates the script might fail.

The quicker method would be to use PowerPhotos to find all of the duplicates, marks the lower resolution as the duplicated and have them put in an album for mass deletion.

Chris Friend wrote:

To do what you say—select a range, then click Merge—doesn't that merge all the selected photos into a single photo?

No, it is better than that, it will merge all selected groups of duplicates separately. But if the photos are having different metadata, it may be better to check them, before we merge, so no metadata will be lost. If one of the duplicates is in the Shared library, and one in the privat library, the merged version will be added to the shared library. We have to move it back, if we want it in the private library.

Before I merge photos, I add all versions to an album, so I can find the merged version after merging the photos, to check, if I am satisfied with the result.

Thanks for confirming/clarifying.

I most definitely do not want to merge all because there are a few pairs that show how imperfect duplicate detection is. But selecting huge swaths at once will save tons of time. I appreciate the help.

So, if I merge duplicates, that’s good. But this does not include photos I’ve selected for shared and private albums? I have way too many shared albums… this deletion of duplicates leaves photos in the albums and the albums intact instead of deleting them? My understanding is that a photo added to an album is not “duplicated” so much as “shared” with the album?

The merging of duplicates should just remove the extraneous files. The photos that you put in the albums will still be in the albums, they just won’t be physical copies on disk taking up extra space. That’s how albums normally work anyway though.

What do you mean by "merge"? The duplicates album in a Photos library is to you can identify duplicate and delete one of them, thus thinning out the library.