Photos - removing duplicate photos

If you remain with Monterey, 12.6.7, you can use one of these two apps to cull out duplicates in your library:

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.

I have had good experiences using Photosweeper though Ventura's Merge Duplicates feature is easier to use.

However, I'd urge extreme caution using that feature as it seems to have nearly destroyed my library recently. I had tens of thousands of duplicates from corruption to the library, probably due to iCloud bugs, and the merge feature mostly deleted the wrong copies of photos. Thank heaven for undelete.

By "wrong" I mean given two jpegs with the same dimensions/pixel count it would often delete the far larger version and keep the smaller (presumably far more compressed, lower quality) version. I spent several hours on the phone with supposedly high-level creative media support reps and no one could/would tell me what Apple means by "higher quality" which Merge supposedly preserves, except that the last rep insisted that if two files had the same number of pixels they had to be the same quality, even if one is much more compressed/smaller, which is dangerously false information. (Dangerous at least if you care much for family photos.) It's possible there's some other variable that affects quality in jpegs but no one could suggest anything and simply insisted on mathematically impossible answers.

Also, this is partly a matter of preference but given two equal-pixel images Merge seems always to keep the *newest* dated copy rather than the oldest, no matter how small/compressed the file (not a matter of preference). If like me you often back-date scans or emailed photos to match the time they were taken this is not a good feature. I'm not sure when anyone would want to keep the newer but worse-quality version of a file.

Based on phone support Apple might repeat here "but we keep higher quality"--*maybe*, but they owe us an answer to what they mean by "quality", and none has ever been offered except "more pixels" (or HEIC format), which is insane. (I should add, some support reps were outstanding and rebuilt my corrupt library but couldn't fully fix it.)

Sorry, probably more info than you want to know and should probably be it's own post. But I'd check carefully what Photos proposes to merge if you use that feature. And be sure to keep (and backup) full-size copies of all photos on your computer outside the Photos app because like all apps this one has bugs, and some are pretty awful. I'm still recovering from this snafu, two years on, but think I'll finish dealing with it soon.

Photos offers an automatic duplicate detection, but you would have to upgrade to macOS 13 Ventura - the older versions do not support this.

Your current version, Photos 7 on Monterey, is also scanning for duplicates and similar photos, but does not yet offer the detected duplicates in a Duplicates album for removal, like Photos 8 on Ventura is doing. Photos 7 is only using the duplicate detection to keep duplicates and similar photos out of sight in the curated layout on the Library > Days view. You could use the Days as a starting point to look for duplicates. All items you are not seeing in the Days are potential candidates for duplicates or redundant, similar photos. Just toggle between the "Days "and "All Photos" to see the additional photos that are omitted in the Days.

You could also use a smart album to find the photos, that have been omitted in the days. Select all photos in the days, then add all selected photos to a new album "Curated" (File > New album with selection).

Now create a new smart album "File > New Smart Album), and set the rule to "Album is not Curated". You may want to add a date range, if you only selected the photos from a particular month or year. Combine both rules with "Match all". You could also add a rule "Photo is not Favorite" to protect your favorite photos. Or "Photo is not screenshot", as all screenshots are suppressed in the Days view.

This will give you a starting point for cleaning up.

For example:

Sorry, my post has been not quite clear. In my example the "Curated" in the Album rule is not an option, but the name of the album, where I added all photos photos from the "Days". You could use any name for the album, where you collect the photos from the "Days". I need this album, so I can check with a smart album, which photos are not shown in the Days, because they are redundant.

See my long reply--I have a huge library (currently 76k, should be 45k-ish) and have spent two years dealing with duplicates. If many pics are important to you I'd recommend spending some time working out a plan to figure out which copies to delete, and really like Photosweeper, but that one takes some thought b/c you choose exactly what criteria to use to delete duplicates (like smaller file, newer date, etc.). Ventura's Merge is v easy but has serious limitations. Good luck!

léonie:

If all of the albums have been curated will the curated option be shown in the Albums? I don't have a curated option under Albums "is or is not" in a smart album.

In my MAC I have 133,398 Photographs. I would like to delete a lot of them - but not all. Have you access to a program that can do this?