How to find/locate identical photos in the catalog, some with different file names as a result of backing up. Photos in various folders on some older hard drives but are the same photo with different file name.

There is no built-in way to find duplicates in Aperture, sorry.

You may use the sort options to display similar images side by side; e.g. select the "Photos" view and arrange the images by filename, date, or size will show identical images next to each other in the browser. If you know someting special about the projects, that might be containing duplicates, you can use the search fields or smart albums, to filter your images and display only the relevant images, based on dates, places, faces, keywords, etc.

You also could try and download

Duplicate Annihilator (Aperture Edition):

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/aperture/duplicateannihilatorapertureediti on.html

Good luck

Léonie

If the metadata of your files are identical, you should have the "Do not import duplicates" box checked when you import folders as projects. That should prevent most duplicates from importing.

However, if the metadata are different in any way, the files will import as two separate originals. I have yet to find an automated tool that will not make "mistakes" in cleaning up these duplicates, sometimes because the metadata of the old files are changed.

I am currently creating a clean repository of original images and doing any comparisons of conflicts visually in two File Finder windows before importing the "clean" folders of originals into Aperture. You can also import everything into Aperture first and then delete what you don't want, as Leonie describes. I just found File Finder faster for me to keep track of where everything was stored and what directories I was comparing.

However, if the metadata are different in any way, the files will import as two separate originals.

That is correct in a general way, but depends on the kind of metadata we are talking about:

• If you have added metadata tags (keywords, places, faces, captions) to your image and even written these tags to the original file, Aperture will still recognize the file you originally imported without these tags as a duplicate and not import it again, if you set the "do not import duplicates" flag.
• But if you changed the filename, the jpeg quality, the filesize, or the pixelsize - then Aperture will consider this to be a new file, and that is the situation that Greg has been asking about, if I understand him correctly: "some with different filenames".

So, for these images "do not import duplicates" will not help.

Regards

Léonie