Sometimes Photos adds similar but IMO significantly different photos to Duplicates. There's no way to mark them as non-duplicates or adjust threshold that Photos uses to detect duplicates. They're just always there.
For example, following two screenshots have significant difference IMO. There're also some photography pictures with significant partial difference that Photos marks them as duplicates.
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 14.1
The duplicates album is not only showing exact duplicates, but also visually similar photos. This is intentional.
You are right, there is not yet a tool to remove suggested duplicates from the Duplicates album. When I wat to remove a photo from there, I modify one of the duplicates slightly by adding tiny adjustments to it, that can be removed again. This will temporarily remove the "duplicate" we want to keep from the album.
Nearly all suggested duplicates in the duplicates album are duplicates that I have created intentionally, because I an needing different versions of the same photo, with a different dater cropped differently.
The duplicates album is not only showing exact duplicates, but also visually similar photos. This is intentional.
You are right, there is not yet a tool to remove suggested duplicates from the Duplicates album. When I wat to remove a photo from there, I modify one of the duplicates slightly by adding tiny adjustments to it, that can be removed again. This will temporarily remove the "duplicate" we want to keep from the album.
Nearly all suggested duplicates in the duplicates album are duplicates that I have created intentionally, because I an needing different versions of the same photo, with a different dater cropped differently.
One thing you can try is to ignore the contents of the Duplicate folder (it doesn't take up any additional space on the drive) and try a 3rd party duplicate finder. There are only two that I can recommend. 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.
You can try the out and see if they give you any more control over what it considers duplicates. PowerPhotos is by far the more powerful of them. can scan photos in libraries without opening Photos and is also the premier support tool for Photos.
Let's all rant together. I've had this in my duplicates since Ventura arrived:
As namniav said, it's a sequence, and I want to keep it. In fact there are several from this sequence that show up.
I've made slight adjustments in one, and that works, but as léonie said, 'This will temporarily remove the "duplicate". It comes back with the next scan! Doing "similars" is very helpful and useful, and I'm sure it takes a very clever algorithm, but there ought to be a way to "protect" certain pictures.
The only thing we can do is leave feedback here:
again. I'll go do that now.
There're hundreds of photos in suggested duplicates that I want to remove from suggested duplicates. I don't want to edit them one by one.
Some of them are photo sequences. For example, photos of a sequence of moving stars are quite similar since stars move slowly. It's totally reasonable that Photos suggests them as duplicates, however, I still want an option to remove them from suggested duplicates.
Some of them are similar photos but have local difference in parts of the photos. For example, a photo that there're flowers on a desk and another photo that there's no. There're also some screenshots with different text. In this case, it would be better that Photos can tell the difference, e.g., by allowing adjusting thresholds. If it cannot tell the difference, then an option to manually remove them would be really helpful.
The reason I want to remove them, not just keep them there, is that:
Photos recognize different photos as duplicate.
