Do you get duplicates if you Airdrop to yourself?

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Level 1

40 points

Do you get duplicates if you Airdrop to yourself?

I just returned from a cruise where we had little internet access, so I could not synch my devices with icloud. However, we had wifi access that both my devices could connect to. I figured out that I could airdrop photos and videos to myself from my iphone to my ipad. However, I worried what would happen when I got home and both devices synced to icloud and with my stayed-at-home Mac.

Can someone explain if photos/videos have a unique filename that stays the same across all devices, whether you airdrop or icloud-sync or itunes-sync those devices? Alot of my photos/videos look very similar, and it will take me awhile to figure out if they are duplicates or not. So just thought I would ask here.

Initially, it appears that everything is everywhere (even stuff I deleted off my iphone before reconnecting at home).

thanks for your help!

-mj lee

iphone-OTHER, iOS 9.1, null

Posted on Aug 14, 2016 12:56 PM

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Answer 1

Corrie84

Community Specialist

Aug 15, 2016 4:49 PM in response to mjlee

Hi mjlee,

I understand that you have some questions about syncing iCloud on your devices after a nice cruise. I know that it's important to have all of your data up to date, so I'm happy to provide some information to help with this.

If you were able to connect to Wi-Fi while on the cruise, as you stated, then your devices would use that to update and sync iCloud. If you are using iCloud Photo Library, you should have seen any changes to your photos across your devices. You can see more about iCloud Photo Library here:

iCloud Photo Library - Apple Support

Since you may have some of the same photos on multiple devices, I understand not wanting duplicates. When uploading your images, iCloud uses different information about them to ensure that there are as few duplicates as possible. Despite this, it's possible that you may still get a few if there were any changes to any of the images

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities, cheers!

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Answer 2

mjlee Author

Level 1

40 points

Aug 15, 2016 4:58 PM in response to Corrie84

Thanks for ur reply. After I got my devices back on iCloud, I made the mistake of plugging them both into my mac so that I could back them up directly to my computer. When connecting via USB, Photos asked on each device if I wanted to import All New Items, which I stupidly said yes.

I ended up with 6 copies of everything. But maybe that wouldn't have happened if I had not imported all new items, so it's hard to tell what the real answer is.

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