Duplicates and Photos 6.0

Some more food for thought on duplicates in Photos:

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 agree with Richard.Taylor that PowerPhotos is the better app as it can do so much more.

In Ventura and beyond, Duplicates are put into a special folder and can be merged or deleted. In version 11.7, Big Sur, there's not such a capability.If you can, it is probably worthwhile to upgrade.

There are very few third party apps that work safely with a Photos Library. Many that try just mess things up-- sometimes irretrievably.

Before Ventura, many of us used  PowerPhotos ($30) to help with duplicates. This is one of the few apps that we are sure can be trusted to fool around inside a Photos Library-- the app has been around ever since iPhoto many years ago, and it does all sorts of helpful things, including helping with duplicates. They offer a free trial so you can test it out.

Dealing with duplicates is still a time consuming job, but PowerPhotos helps.

Duplicates is hard! These two pictures

keep coming up as duplicates in Photos. I can't convince it to forget them!

Photos distinguishes between Exact and Similar duplicates, but there's no system that doesn't get frustrating. I've used some (before Ventura) that worked in Finder before I loaded them into Photos, and it was always slow going. I was going though old backup disks, and I had backups of backups, so there were 10 or 15 copies of pictures, and many had different file names. "Gemini 2" was the best-- but only outside of Photos! Don't trust any "extension" or app that claims to work inside the Photos Library without recommendations from people like Old Toad!

(Stuff from Houdah software is good, but they don't do duplicates.)

Both of the apps I mentioned put the duplicates that you don't want to keep in an album in the Photos library. Then you can check them out and decide to delete them or not.

Photos 8.0 puts them in an album but you must decide to merge the (which deletes one of them) or decide which one to keep. It's not totally automatic as Richard pointed out with his example.