Merging 10,000s of duplicates in iPhotos

Thank you!! This is good information to know! I hope I haven’t already messed up. I may choose to revert to a previous backup, just in case. Some of the photos that I merged were our wedding photos.

I added to my post. I think it appears as if I posted the same thing all over again, looking at the first few lines. I would love to have your input on the other questions that I posed, if and when you have time. Thank you again for your response!!

Yes, I have a Macbook.

1. How do I merge thousands of duplicate photos in iPhoto without having to individually approve every merge?

My phone says that I have around 150,000 photos, with 94,000 of those being duplicates!! 🫣🤦🏼‍♀️ It’s a mess!! I’m not sure exactly why some have duplicated so many times, but I’ve kicked the can down the road long enough. One of my oldest digital photos that I have transferred from iPhone to iPhone, iPad to iPad and MacBook to MacBook has 48 copies!! I do not know if it is due to the transfers or software update glitches, but I also have a ton of photos from my husband’s and my mother-in-law’s phones from a time when we were all on a family sharing plan using a shared Apple ID, so that we could share app subscriptions that allowed multiple downloads. Oh what a mess!! Somehow, neither of them received each other’s photos or mine. I was the one blessed with all of theirs. 😬I’ve had to sort through and delete a multitude of recipes, photos of my MIL’s dogs, and random screenshots of texts that she had on her camera roll, and hunting, salt water aquarium and motorcycle photos from my husband.

2.Is there any way to identify something from my husband’s and MIL’s metadata that I can use to search, find, and delete their photos individually in one fell swoop each?

3.Last, all the faces that appear in my Faces folders appear as individual photos to be merged, and they are the first photos showing up to be merged. About 1,000 photos into the merging process this evening, I realized that I was merging the Faces folder’s photos, not individual photos that just happened to all be close ups of people’s faces. Is this going to mess up the corresponding photos that the faces belong to, if I am just merging similar photos and not faces from the exact same duplicate photos?

Any and all help is much appreciated! Especially if you have actually had this issue and found a solution that worked.

Man, we never had this much trouble when we only had 24 or 36 exposure rolls of film! 🤣 We actually wanted duplicates back then! WOW, what a difference 30 yrs makes!!