Unable to merge duplicated photos in Photos on iPad

Laurand wrote:…I accidentally duplicated 600 photos in a library but cannot merge them now. There is no option under utilities to merge. Can anyone help.

The Duplicates folder may only appear in Utilities if Photos finds duplicates. The Merge command is on the right:

But I wonder if you really have "Duplicates" in the sense that Photos means it. The thing is, a picture can appear in multiple albums; you can see a picture in several places, but they are all just the same picture! An album is really just the names of pictures you want to see together-- all that's "in" an album are the names, and a picture's name can be in lots of different albums.

If these are actually duplicate files-- you tapped the button in More(•••) that says Duplicate, for instance, then Photos will have to scan the Library for duplicates before it can make a Duplicates album, and that might take awhile.

I tested this, Laurand.

I selected several photos in Photos on my iPad and used the command "Duplicate".

All selected photos are now appearing twice in the album and the duplicate versions are showing the same filename in the info. The duplicates are also appearing twice in the Library in "All Photos". is it the same in your case? The "Duplicate" command is creating a duplicate version in the library, whether I am using it in an album or not. And sooner or later these versions will appear in the Duplicates album. All my photos I duplicated intentionally because I need a photo twice in an album are appearing in the Duplicates album after a while.

Laurand wrote: … will I just need to go to my Album and remove the duplicates manually. Does that make sense.

The Duplicates are absolutely exact-- so you can't tell the new ones from the old, and you can't separate the new ones from the old-- and it doesn't matter! …… except for this:

If a picture's name is listed in Album A and also in Album B, and you duplicate it in Album A, then the new file will be listed in Album A, but not in Album B. So, the original and duplicate may be listed in different albums.

If that's not a concern, then the pictures are identical and you can delete either one.

léonie: We've talked about Apparent Duplicates and Actual Duplicate Files, and I'm getting confused. See if this is a "complete" description…

• Apparent Duplicates in different albums look the same because they are the same-- changing one will change the other. It's the same file seen from different views. Since they are the same file, they use no extra space.

• Actual Duplicate Files can be created with the Duplicate button on an iDevice or with Command-D on a Mac. There will then be two identical files in the album of creation, but the created duplicate won't be in any other albums. Since they are separate files, changing one of these with edits or comments will not change the other.

• Actual Duplicate Files might be accidentally imported by merging or somehow bypassing Photos' pretty good Duplicate detection.

• Similar Files that look alike but have some different properties like resolution or comments can also appear in Photos' Duplicate album, and they take careful examination before deleting or merging.

Did I get everything we said?

That's right, Richard, particularly the observations about the albums, but the actual duplicates are weird animals. The behavior is depending on the system version and poorly documented.

• When I create an actual duplicate by duplicating the image in Photos I am getting two separate versions, but they are using the original image file. I can edit both versions separately, eg. turning one of the them black and white, and the other version will remain the same but the originals will be showing the same filename in Photos. And Photos is storing a renamed original for the duplicate. The same goes, when I import the same image file twice and ignore the warning, that I am about to import a duplicate. Each duplicate has a version file and an original file with a unique name.
• What is weird, is the following:
  • In the earlier versions of Photos the duplicate originals could easily be identified as hard links, because they all had the same inode number in the file table. The inode can be inspected in the Terminal with is -i . Duplicating an image did not increase the storage.
  • When I now (on Tahoe and APFS) check the originals folder (on my Mac) by looking into the package contents, all originals are having different inode numbers and the total size of the Photos Library is increasing in the Finder and Disk Utility when I duplicate an image. But I can make the library larger than the available disk space and there is still free storage. So I expect, that the duplicates are now created by the APFS as clones and not as hard links. I have not yet found a way to check if a file is a clone and is sharing disk blocks with the original. There seems to be no way to show in the Terminal the INODE_WAS_CLONED flag.

I used a small test library with just one imported image file on my Mac. The library size kept growing and growing, when I duplicated the image, but duplicating a file on APFS should automatically create a clone on APFS, so the library size should not change. https://eclecticlight.co/2024/03/20/apfs-files-and-clones/

Cheers, Léonie (the system logged me in with my second AppleID)

Lúthiën_Tinúviël wrote:

• That's right, Richard, particularly the observations about the albums, but the actual duplicates are weird animals. The behavior is depending on the system version and poorly documented.

When I create an actual duplicate by duplicating the image in Photos I am getting two separate versions, but they are using the original image file. I can edit both versions separately, eg. turning one of the them black and white, and the other version will remain the same but the originals will be showing the same filename in Photos.

In my tests, the "original" file name is the same, but the GUID file name is different. Even though APFS is being very clever, I think I would call it a separate file in the usual sense. I'm guessing the behavior is more classical in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.

I can make the library larger than the available disk space and there is still free storage.

Your experiments and analysis are very eye opening! APFS seems to behave as a Tardis, where the inside is bigger than the outside! Thanks for this!

When you duplicate photos in the Photos.app, the duplicates will not need much extra storage. The duplicates are sharing the originals. You can wait for them to appear in the Duplicates album.