Combining identical but unrecognized photos on iPhone

Are you saying that you have duplicate pictures that are not listed in the Duplicates view? Are you sure that they are the same? Sometimes on has higher resolution than the other, for instance. You can certainly delete one of them, but which one?

This is a little hard, since you don't say if this is on an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac. As an example, here is the Info Window from a picture on my iPhone:

The captions may be different on different pictures. Do you want to copy the caption from one to the other?

I've circled the Resolution where it says 7712 x 4338 • 27.8 MB. "712 x 4338" is the resolution, and bigger numbers usually represent more detail. 27MB is the file size, and larger file size might mean more information, but that depends on the format of the picture, so small differences don't matter much.

I've also marked where the Info Window shows that this picture is in two albums. If you click on the > arrow, it will show you which two albums.

When Photos finds duplicates, and you tell it to Merge, it tries to take all this into consideration when it deletes one. If the two pictures are in different album, for instance, it will list the remaining picture in all the albums that the deleted one was in.

So, you can certainly delete one of the pictures, but you should think about which one what stuff you might want to copy into the other.

Is this what you needed?

That is my strategy too, Richard. I am dealing with duplicates, when I come across them.

There should not be many exact duplicates in or Photos Libraries anyway, as Photos is checking for duplicates on import and warning us, when we are trying to import the same photo twice.

I am having three kinds of duplicates in my library:

• 1. Old duplicates created by syncing problems with My Photo Stream or manual syncing with iTunes, before we had iCloud Photos. My Photo Stream has been a continual source of duplicates.
  • It transferred the new photos taken on the iPhone or iPad to my Macs, in a full resolution. That was good.
  • It transferred the new photos imported to the Mac in a lesser resolution to the iPhone and iPad, thus creating similar files. when I saved the synced photos on the iPhone or iPad to keep them there, they synced back to the Mac, creating duplicates. A nuisance.
• 2. There are quite a few duplicates I created intentionally, because I wanted differently cropped or edited versions of the same photo.
• 3. Most of the duplicates are similar photos, photos taken in quick succession, or photos taken of the same scene at different times. In all these cases I need to pick the best version manually - it is a matter of artistic taste, and Photos cannot do that for us. I rarely like the key photos, Photos is picking for a year, a month, albums, or memories.

Your screenshots are showing an interesting example - two similar images with the same resolution ( a width and height of 2048 x 1536 pixel), but with a different file size, probably because a different amount of JPEG compression. You really want to keep the version with the smaller file size? You will lose image quality and it will be harder to edit the image, if you want to add adjustments.

It is hard to predict, which version of two similar images with the same resolution will be preserved by Photos when we merge them. When I tested this, Photos kept the version with the smaller file size, which will save storage but lose quality. It is one reason why I am not trusting the automatic merging and are selecting the keepers myself, after merging the metadata manually, as described by Richard.

As léonie says, in Sequoia:

As léonie and I have said, with two files with the same resolution, a larger file may have more information-- however, an heic formatted picture can be smaller than jpeg format but still have more information--and there are lots of other possibilities. Usually, with no other information, I'd pick the larger file. But, first, just look at them, and pick the one that looks best!

Also, you have to think about if you have already edited one of them. If they are similar, then you can use Image>Copy Edits (⇧⌘C) and Image>Paste Edits (⇧⌘V) to preserve your edits on the picked one.

Unfortunately, all this takes time! I'm afraid I have lots of duplicates that I just haven't gotten around to. I'm not sure that I've even admitted this to myself, but I'm thinking, "So what?" I'm not concerned about running out of space anytime soon, and the duplicates don't really hurt anything. So, maybe I'll just take care of them as I need to-- like when I want to use a picture and I find two of them. The rest can wait, I think…

Ahh-- you're on a Mac! That helps. Pictures on iPads are beautiful to look at. Pictures on iPhones are very portable. But Macs are way easier for organization than with iThings.

In Photos "Duplicates" tells you they have Simalars and Identicals. (Well, I made those words up.) So you have to be careful.

For similar pictures, I pick one and copy info from the other. There's no way to do it automatically, because the decisions are different for different pairs--you just have to do it. In your case, the caption is empty on your pick, so there might be a script that would copy and paste for you, but since that doesn't always apply, and it probably isn't the same for all fields, a script doesn't seem any easier.

I triple-click on a Title of the throw-away to get the whole thing, and then I paste to the Title field of my Pick. And so on. For Keywords, Paste doesn't replace-- it appends, so that's good. For Location, it's Image>Location>Copy Location, and mage>Location>Assign Location.

Duplicates can be hard…

EllenVoice wrote:

I feel silly, "copy location", it's that easy......

Not silly at all. The earlier versions of Photos for Mac (macOS Big Sur or earlier) would not copy the location but the name of the location. And when we applied the copied location, the Place could be many miles away and completely wrong. This has been fixed in the more recent system versions.

Just another question then, if I may. On iPad you can see in what albums the pictures are, I can't find that feature on my Macbook... I guess that must be possible too?

On a Mac with macOS 15.4 Sequoia you can also see which album a photo is in.

Select the photo, then use the command "File > Show in Album".

Which system version is installed on your Mac? Can you update to macOS 15.4 ?