Is there a way to search for photos that are duplicated in folders? I did find an attempted answer to this question on line but it doesn't work. The "solution" says you can drag a photo into the search field and it will show where all the copies are but that doesn't work. Thanks for any help!
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 13.7
For the record, markwmsn asked if you were seeing these pictures using the Photos app, or if you were looking in Finder folders. He did not ask you to look inside the Photos Library package. I thought it was important to warn you before you did some damage. Hence the all caps!
So, apparently you are looking at pictures using the Photos app. In Photos, we can store pictures in multiple albums, so the picture of "Aunt Ethel at the Grand Canyon" can be in the "Aunt Ethel" album with other pictures of Aunt Ethel, and it can also be in the "Grand Canyon" album with pictures of other people at the Grand Canyon. And it can also be in a the "September 2015" album with other things that happened then.
Keep in mind that, in Photos, pictures aren't exactly "in" an album. When you "put a picture into an album," its name is added to a list of pictures from the Library that display together when the album is clicked, kind of like a music playlist, but for pictures. It takes no extra storage space to have a picture in several albums. As you can imagine, this is very powerful in organizing pictures.
In Sequoia (which I understand you can't use,) for the first time Photos can show all the albums that a picture is in. But that is not available in Ventura. Before Sequoia, we used the trusted 3rd party app PowerPhotos ($30) to tell all the albums that referenced a picture file, as well as for lots of other stuff.
Ventura was the first OS that showed us actual duplicate files. In the Duplicates section, you may find two different copies of a picture in two different albums. Photos will "merge" the two, meaning it will delete one of the two and include the remaining picture in all the albums that either was in.
Does that help?
Maybe somebody could answer if you narrowed down your question for us.
Are these photos currently stored in Finder folders or in Photos library folders/albums?
Are you interested in finding only exact copies with identical metadata, or do you also want to see derivative or merely similar images?
Is your Mac really still running macOS 13.7 as shown in the footer of your post?
Markwmsn,
All the photos are in the Photos Library folder. I don't see a folder called albums in there, it looks like all the photos are in a folder called originals. In Photos all the photos are listed in Library. Each one of these photos should only be in one Album but many are in several. I'm trying to see what exact Photos are duplicated in several Albums. My Mac is running OS 13.7 because Ventura is the newest OS I can run on this Mac.
Let me know if you have any other questions and thanks for your help!
Jeffrey Madson wrote: …All the photos are in the Photos Library folder. I don't see a folder called albums in there, it looks like all the photos are in a folder called originals.
DO NOT MESS AROUND INSIDE THE PHOTOS LIBRARY package. A database is using those files to make Photos work. If you change something, delete a file, move a file-- then the Library may become unusable!
Did you make a backup before doing this??
Richard,
I have not made any changes in the Photos Library. I was asked where all my photos are located from markwmsn.
I want to know that within the Photos Application is there a way to see if one of the photos in the library are in multiple Albums and which ones they are.
Richard,
Thanks for that information and it answers exactly what I was asking.
Glad it helped.
Too many copies of one photo in many places.
