Removing duplicate photos.

Question

Removing duplicate photos.

I recently noticed I have a ton of Photos Albums that contain duplicates. I do not think there are really two copies of the image in the Library file. I upgraded my old "Duplicate Annihilator for iPhoto" to their new version for Photos for Mac and it did report duplicates, but none that it tagged with "duplicate" were the ones I was seeing doubles of:

http://www.brattoo.com/propaganda/

With the old iPhoto, I know you could take a photo and drag it to an Album, and also in to another Album so it appears in two places. I expect Photos for Mac does the same thing, and somewhere along the line photos got dragged twice.

Does anyone know a simple way to get rid of these?

MacBook, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), Late 2009 model.

Posted on Jun 6, 2015 4:55 PM

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Answer 1

Old Toad

Level 10

207,715 points

Jun 6, 2015 5:19 PM in response to Allen Huffman

If you're seeing the photos in multiple albums they are not duplicates but only pointers to the original images in the Moments. it's like audio tracks in playlists in iTunes. One file can be in multiple playlists or albums and not take up any additional space on the hard drive.

If you're seeing duplications in separate Moments these applications will identify and help remove duplicate photos from a Photos Library:

Duplicate Annihilator for Photos - $7.95
PhotoSweeper - $9.99 - Demo version available.
PowerPhotos - $19.95

PowerPhotos is the iPhoto Library Manager version for Photos and is very powerful. Although more expensive I would recommend it as it has more capabilities than the others and will have added capability in the future.

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Answer 2

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Jun 6, 2015 5:20 PM in response to Allen Huffman

Those are not duplicates - putting a photos in multiple albums does not create any duplicates - it is simply multiple ways to view the same photo

And there is no way to see what albums a photo is in - if you have photos in albums that you do not want there right click on them and remove from album (do not delete the photos - that removes it from the library and it is gone everywhere)

LN

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Answer 3

Jun 6, 2015 7:11 PM in response to Old Toad

Thank you for the response. As I mentioned in my original post, I have tried using Duplicate Annihilator for Photos. While it may resolve issues with duplicate JPG files in the library, it does not do anything about duplicate aliases in the same Album.

Perhaps there is no solution but "just go through and look at everything manually and manually delete them".

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Answer 4

Jun 6, 2015 7:12 PM in response to LarryHN

Exactly. As I said, I do not believe there are two copies. It is the alias in the library. I could easily spend the next few weeks manually deleting things that appear more than once, but I had hoped there was some solution out there.

The real puzzler is what happened to cause most of my libraries to duplicate images inside of them. I don't actually use Photos for much other than images I take on the iPhone/iPad, so I only have a dozen or so Albums and the rest is just "Misc" stuff.

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Answer 5

Jun 6, 2015 7:17 PM in response to Allen Huffman

More updates. I have been digging in to this a bit further and this may be new behavior (sometimes called a "bug") with Photos for Mac.

There are two issues happening:

1) Duplicate photos have appeared in most of my Albums. I am unclear on how this happened.

2) I have a Smart Album called "Unfiled" which shows me all the photos that are not in an album. Possibly due to a problem with Duplicate Annihilator, I now have over 500 images in that Unfiled smart album, where the other day I had maybe five.

When I moved some images, I see now that things that look the same are the same resolution, but a file size difference (1.4MB versus 1.5MB), and the one that is larger has the keyword tag "Photo Stream." I do not have the "Show in Finder" or similar option that iPhoto had, so I will have to dig in the package and see what the differences are.

I had thought Photo Stream left images as-is, but something is getting changed or added to a resource fork or something. Interesting.

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Answer 6

Old Toad

Level 10

207,715 points

Jun 7, 2015 10:33 AM in response to Allen Huffman

Do you have the Photos/iCloud preferences set as shown in this screenshot:

If you do than you are importing the photos into the library as they are added by your phone to the My Photo Stream. What type of albums are you seeing these additional aliases in? Launch Photos with the Command+Option keys held down and repair the library and see if there's any change top those aliases.

You don't have to dig into the package to get the info on the photos. Select a photos and type Command + i to bring up the Info pane for it. That will give you the info you need:

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Answer 7

R C-R

Level 6

17,782 points

Jun 7, 2015 12:27 PM in response to Allen Huffman

Allen Huffman wrote:

When I moved some images ...

What exactly do you mean by this? Moved what images from where to where? What method did you use?

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Answer 8

R C-R

Level 6

17,782 points

Jun 7, 2015 12:42 PM in response to Old Toad

Old Toad wrote:

What type of albums are you seeing these additional aliases in?

Technically, I am fairly sure album references are not aliases -- at least I can't find any aliases in my Photos libraries besides the three top level ones pointing to the Master, Preview, & Thumbnails folders.

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Answer 9

Old Toad

Level 10

207,715 points

Jun 7, 2015 3:46 PM in response to R C-R

There won't be an alias file in the library for those. They are "alias"/links in the database pointing the original file in the Moment.

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Answer 10

R C-R

Level 6

17,782 points

Jun 7, 2015 4:17 PM in response to Old Toad

Old Toad wrote:

There won't be an alias file in the library for those. They are "alias"/links in the database pointing the original file in the Moment.

The thing about that is there are multiple databases in the Photos Library, & they seem to be interlinked in various ways that are not clear, at least to me. Any idea if there is just one database with entries related to which albums an item might be in, & if so which one it might be?

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Answer 11

Old Toad

Level 10

207,715 points

Jun 7, 2015 4:30 PM in response to R C-R

I have no idea. I would think it would be the Library.apdb file as it's the biggest dB file in the library.

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Answer 12

Jun 7, 2015 6:31 PM in response to R C-R

Yes, poor use of wordage since I don't know what to call the image references. In the database the file image.jpg exists, and then you can drag it into multiple albums and it shows up there. Those things.

Now, if you select 50 images and drag them to an album, then later you select the same 50 and drag them in, you now have TWO of each there. Those are the things I am trying to get rid of.

In my case, some of the problem albums I very well could have done this without realizing it. In the second issue, that corruption I cannot explain. I will do the rebuild. I have not done that since migrating to Photos.

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Answer 13

Jun 7, 2015 6:44 PM in response to Old Toad

Thanks, OT. The Info pane is where I got the size from. I do have my Photo Stream enabled so I get the images on my old iPhone, iPad, Mac mini and MacBook. I did the rebuild and will see how it goes.

I may need to dig in to how the library albums work and see if I can make my own script to prune the duplicates. As I inspect them, I see many are the same (one tagged Photo Stream, the other not) with different sizes. Some do not have the keyword tag, but are different sizes. I am perplexed where they came from, but that seems to be the issue that. I want to get to the actual JPG files and look at them in GraphicConverter or something and see what might be different than the size that Photos for Mac reports.

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Answer 14

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Jun 7, 2015 6:45 PM in response to Allen Huffman

and again

And there is no way to see what albums a photo is in - if you have photos in albums that you do not want there right click on them and remove from album (do not delete the photos - that removes it from the library and it is gone everywhere)

LN

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Answer 15

Jun 7, 2015 6:53 PM in response to LarryHN

I think we all know how to delete images (the reference/alias, or the actual file from the library). I would just like the stop this from happening:

(pause while I go to get a screen shot, and discover...)

Ah, database corruption OR actual duplicate files. I just made an Album, tried to drag the same picture to it multiple times (you used to be able to do this with iPhone, much to my annoyance), and it only placed one in there. This seems to confirm my observation that seeing the images have slightly different since means the physical files have somehow been duplicated, and added to the same library. I never did this -- most of these were just taken and synced from Photo Stream.

Does the image from Photo Stream match what I would get if I later downloaded the images via USB cable from the device? It seems not. News to me.

An example of the duplicates:

Information on first two images:

Some of the duplicates do not have "Photo Stream" one one of them, but are different sizes. Duplicate Annihilator has a setting to match based on "looks" of the image and not just an exact file match, so I will do that next. That may get this taken care of.

Is the general consensus that Photos for Mac is stable, or is it still a 1.0 with some quirks and this is just that?

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