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Hello, for a while now I've noted duplicate photos on my mac. Now I have 3-4 duplicates for many older photos. How do you get rid of duplicates? And will that also get rid of duplicates that I modified? Thank you!
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.12
If it is a Flash drive, it may not be suitable for a long term storage, but just fine to free the storage temporarily, so laf143md can upgrade to Ventura. The Photos Library will not be safe on a Flash drive over long periods of time:
See Apple's warning here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
" And to avoid possible data loss, don't store your library on a removable storage device like an SD card or USB flash drive, or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud-based storage service."
If it is a Flash drive, it may not be suitable for a long term storage, but just fine to free the storage temporarily, so laf143md can upgrade to Ventura. The Photos Library will not be safe on a Flash drive over long periods of time:
See Apple's warning here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
" And to avoid possible data loss, don't store your library on a removable storage device like an SD card or USB flash drive, or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud-based storage service."
When I've run low on disk space, the most refreshing thing I've done it to load all my stuff to an external hard drive, verify it, and erase a bunch of stuff from my internal drive that I don't seem to need much. It's good to have space to move around!
This isn't what you asked about, but a guy here who goes by Old Toad recommends a 1 TB thumb drive that Amazon has for $32. It's a bit slow, 80MB/s, but cheap.
A 1000 MB/s drive costs about $75. If it's just for storage, slow doesn't hurt. Fast is important if you keep things like your Photos Library on it that you read and write to a lot while using it.
Duplicate pictures are just hard. If they are exact duplicates, then they have the same date and time, and you can sort by "oldest first," and you can often see duplicates pop out because they'll be side by side.
I'm not sure what you mean by face pictures, though.
That's now what I recommend. It's a mini drive from OWC (MacSalex.com), 250GB, 500GB or 1TB OWC Envoy Pro mini, which has the following connection capabilities:
Host Interface
USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C
Those have speeds up to 20 Gbps
You might be interested in updating to macOS 13 Ventura. Ventura Photos has a built-in duplicates finder. As alway, though, you have to be careful with duplicates-- sometimes they're not exactly the same!
Another option is the $30 app PowerPhotos which has a duplicate finder.
Thank you Richard. I haven't been able to update since OS Monterey because not enough storage to update. Have hundreds, possibly thousands of duplicate photos. Would free up storage if could eliminate.
Have another issue and that is that photos or iphoto in past created additional pictures with faces, so one photo may turn into several with each persons face! Would like to get rid of those also. Thanks. Lori
And, be sure to reformat a hard drive you may get to an Apple format. To get full functionality (and to avoid damaging the Photos Library) an external drive must be formatted in either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. Additionally, the drive can not have had Time Machine on it since it was formatted.
Duplicate photos
