Is there a way to remove duplicate photos all at once or does it have to be done individually? I tried the merge in Photos, but since I have a lot of photos it would take me several weeks to go through and "merge" each duplicate.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Mac mini (M2, 2023)
Using the built-in duplicate detection and manually handling each set is a reliable way to remove duplicates. If you prefer to delete all duplicates at once and don’t mind using a third-party app, you might consider Cisdem Duplicate Finder. This app works well with Photos and can identify both identical and similar photos. It has an auto-selection feature that selects all but one photo from each set of duplicates for deletion, and you can customize this feature. For similar photos, you’ll need to handle them manually. Note that this is a paid app, and you will need to pay to perform deletions.
Using the built-in duplicate detection and manually handling each set is a reliable way to remove duplicates. If you prefer to delete all duplicates at once and don’t mind using a third-party app, you might consider Cisdem Duplicate Finder. This app works well with Photos and can identify both identical and similar photos. It has an auto-selection feature that selects all but one photo from each set of duplicates for deletion, and you can customize this feature. For similar photos, you’ll need to handle them manually. Note that this is a paid app, and you will need to pay to perform deletions.
Like with any files or pictures, you can command-click to select multiple pictures, and you can shift-drag up or down to select a bunch of images. You can delete or merge each row within multiple rows.
But be careful! Duplicates can be exact or similar. Here's a "duplicate" pair that keeps coming up for me:
My Mac thinks they're the same, but they are certainly different, and I want to keep both. Photos gives you a warning about this:
but it's easy to ignore it.
It can be painful, by you should look closely before deleting duplicates! Luckily, the deleted pictures go into Recently Deleted, and you have a month to change your mind. But you can't examine pictures very closely in Recently Deleted, so it's harder after than before.
I'd never casually bulk delete any duplicate candidate.
I always prefer THE one "straight from the horse's mouth" i.e. the original shot.
This is a problem with duplicates from social media sites like Facebook, WhatsApp and cloud services which generate possible duplicates.
I'd 1st check which one I visually prefer.
If it has less resolution, less metadata (especially date and location), more compression than the other candidate, I'd maybe delete it in favor of the other candidate before digging in deeper.
So I'd not let the automatic algorithm decide that. YMMV.
That's interesting. Does it merge, like Photos, or just zap one of the images? If it merges, what is transferred to the saved picture?
Is there a way to remove duplicate photos all at once?
