I am just going through the Library on my Photos and cannot believe how many duplicates are appearing, certainly not done by me. In fact in some cases a photo has been duplicated 12 times! Plus videos. So far I have deleted 2000 duplicate photos and 457 duplicate videos.
How is this happening? Are they like mushrooms multiplying in the dark? Any advice welcomed, Thank You
Anosha
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.7
Photos doesn't duplicate pictures on its own. In fact, it's hard to even import exact duplicates without getting a warning like this:
Sometimes we import pictures that get past the duplicate detection, because they are different formats--maybe one is jpg and another is heic, or something like that. Or one may be cropped differently or have other small differences. You can see in the screenshot above that those pictures look different, but their underlying original files are the same, so Photos recognized that they were the same picture. But Photos also tries not to keep bothering us about pictures that appear to be similar but are not exact duplicates.
How did the pictures get on to your Mac? Importing pictures from a phone or other source can lead to duplicates if we just say "all new" and the formats have been changed, for instance. The import prices usually gives us a chance to look through the pictures and reject ones we don't want.
On an iPhone, we can set the camera to take pictures as High Efficiency or "Most Compatible." In Photos we can set Transfer to Automatic or Keep Originals. If you're not trying to send pictures to a PC, your best bet is to use Highe Efficiency and Keep Originals. That way you won't have formats changing haphazardly.
Do any of these things sound like they could be the cause? Let us know…
Why are duplicates appearing in Photos Library of Macbook?
