Which duplicate photos to keep in Photos on Ventura?

What folder to keep when removing pictures duplicates ?


Under Ventura I ran a script I wrote to flag pictures with same CRC and size. It give the location and the file names. I ran the Merge process but there are still a very long list. A typical cluster of identical pictures is:


/Documents/ Larry multimedia/mulitmedia/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/3/3EFEAF7D-4AB2-40DE-ACFC-AE371ADBAA3D.jpeg

./Documents/ Larry multimedia/mulitmedia/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/F/F7FEBC0B-9AEC-4DC2-BACC-50DA7BE15532.jpeg

./Documents/ Larry multimedia/mulitmedia/Pictures/iPhoto Library.migratedphotolibrary/Originals/2016/2016-08-06/IMG_0922.JPG

./Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/3/3EFEAF7D-4AB2-40DE-ACFC-AE371ADBAA3D.jpeg

./Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/F/F7FEBC0B-9AEC-4DC2-BACC-50DA7BE15532.jpeg


What should I keep or leave ?


Thank you !

Posted on Jan 28, 2026 5:56 PM

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Posted on Jan 28, 2026 11:46 PM

Never, ever interact with the Photos library via the Finder - or anything else - except the Photos app. Doing otherwise will corrupt your lIbrary and lead to dataloss.


Go to the Photos app and select which duplicate you want to preserve there. Then delete the other versions.


Ventura Photos has a duplicates feature that will identify these for you and help you delete the unwanted versions.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 28, 2026 11:46 PM in response to Mike O'Mike

Never, ever interact with the Photos library via the Finder - or anything else - except the Photos app. Doing otherwise will corrupt your lIbrary and lead to dataloss.


Go to the Photos app and select which duplicate you want to preserve there. Then delete the other versions.


Ventura Photos has a duplicates feature that will identify these for you and help you delete the unwanted versions.

Jan 29, 2026 2:16 AM in response to Mike O'Mike

Here is a link to the page in the Photos User Guide explaining the Duplicates album in Photos mentioned by Yer_Man: Remove duplicate photos in Photos on Mac - Apple Support


Some of your duplicates seem to be in the original iPhoto Library.

You are still keeping the old iPhoto Library (/Documents/Larry multimedia/mulitmedia/Pictures/iPhoto Library.migratedphotolibrary) in the Documents folder. You may want to move it to an external drive, since iPhoto will no longer work on Ventura. You will not gain much storage however by moving the library, since duplicates between iPhoto and Photos are stored as hard links and do not need extra storage.


And you seem to be using two separate Photos Libraries, one in the Documents folder and one in the Pictures folder. Do you need to keep separate Photos Libraries or do you want to merge them into one Library? To handle the duplicates between the two Photos Libraries you could import the library from Documents into the library in Pictures (or the smaller library into the larger library). Photos will show you a selection of new photos from the library you are importing from, that are not yet in the library you are importing to. After importing g the new photos you could remove the library you imported from, see: Import photos from another library in Photos on Mac - Apple Support


With all photos in one library the Duplicates album should show you remaining duplicates for inspection. The Duplicates feature on Photos will scan the library when you are not using photos. It will show occasionally new detected duplicates, but it may take a long, long time, until all photos and videos will be scanned.




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Which duplicate photos to keep in Photos on Ventura?

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