Duplicate Photos - Stay in Multiple Albums or Folders?

If you merge the duplicates they will remain in any albums, smart albums or projects that they were in before.

I confess that I'm not using Ventura, but the last I heard was that keywords and album structure are not merged. Of course, you should make some duplicates and try it out.

Here's what I do with albums and duplicates: I go to each album (I have a lot), select all, and add the name of the album as a keyword to all the pictures there. Some pictures are in more than one album, so they will have more than one album keyword. Every picture in an album then has keyword(s) that tells where it belongs. Of course there are also other keywords for names, places, and things, as well.

Then, when I find duplicates, I copy all the keywords of each of the duplicates to the others. Pasting keywords only adds keywords-- it doesn't remove ones already there. So the pictures end up all with the same keywords, including the album names. I keep one and put it in all the albums with those keywords.

That's my plan-- I hope it helps.

They are merged also. I ran a test on a pair of duplicates 1 and 2. Each had a different Title, Caption and Keyword. The keywords and captions for each were merged on the resulting file. Only the title of the second, #2, image was used. Of course the file names were the same as was the location.

When I first tested, with the first version of Ventura, neither the titles nor the captions have been merged, only the keywords. Photos picked one image to keep, and kept the metadata of the keeper image (title, description, location, favourite heart) and, discarded the description and the titles and location of the image, that has been removed.

What now is happening, after updating to the current version, is that Photos is trying to merge the metadata and sometimes making them inconsistent.

• It selects one image as the keeper.
• Then it compares the titles and adds the longest title to the keeper.
• It moves the favourite heart to the keeper.
• It combines both captions and adds the combined captions to the keeper.
• I cannot tell what will happen to named faces, as none of my photos with named faces has yet appeared in Duplicates.

The problem is, that photos is not only merging exact duplicates, but similar images with different state of edits and even different filenames. The moved titles and locations may no longer be correct after being moved to the keeper image. Most titles for my images are starting with the filename and some information on the state of edits. After moving a title to the "Keeper" the filename may be wrong and the state of edit as well.

And the location of the keeper may have been a different location.

For example, I just tested to merge a pair of duplicates.

• A small image, the original, with the title "img256.jpg Kohlmeise im Bierfass orig" and the filename "img256.jpg".
• An upscaled version, using a Lacrosse filter with the title "Kohlmeise im Bierfass scaled" with the filename "img256-lanczos3.jpg"
• The merged version is the upscaled version with the filename "img256-lanczos3.jpg" and has now the title "img256.jpg Kohlmeise im Bierfass orig". The shifted title is showing the wrong filename and the wrong information "orig", as it is not the original. This is causing a lot of extra work, to keep the metadata consistent with the actual image files.

We should only use the "merge" tool for true duplicates, not for similar images.

it took a full day and overnight for a library of 7500 photos and 150 videos to show the test duplicates I added.

This is what ended up after the merge:

It seems only the Keywords and Captions get merged into the final project.

Thanks, OT. How are keywords, faces, and captions handled?

Thanks-- that's definitive. I thought that leonie had said that they weren't merged, but the brain gets muddled. I'm sorry you didn't show us our amphibian fish, though.

Here's the result of another test:

It appears that the Title and Location of the 2nd image is used. The other metadata is merged.

I've got to get some people pictures in my duplicate library for testing. I'll post back with the results when I finish.