Photos and use of 3rd party software-Power Photos

I used the three apps over many weeks to clean up the library but things went wrong again.

All three apps I recommended (PowerPhotos, Photo Sweeper, Duplicate Annihilator) will just script Photos to add photos to an album for removal by Photos. That cannot damage the library. if your library got damaged again after starting from scratch with a new library there must be a different reason for the library corruption. Check your hard disk, search for incompatible software you may have installed, and check, if your Photos Library is installed on a compatible drive. See: Where is it safe to store a Photos Library? Requirements for the external drive

Thank you for posting this. I'm glad Apple is now providing a support document that is warning users to be careful with cleaning apps. I have not seen this particular support document before (Using third-party apps to remove duplicate photos might damage your Photos for macOS library - Apple Support). It is good to know that we now can point to an Apple Document when trying to warn users about certain cleaning apps. Before we had to rely on our own testing results with duplicate removers.

I think I'll go back to using Power Photos.

I never had problems with Power Photos. But beware of products that claim to remove clutter and "redundant working copies" directly from the Photos Library.

It would be nice if Apple just gave us the ability to merge libraries instead of making it so difficult to manage photos.

Hi Larry,

I have purchased all three of these apps due to a nasty mess created by a repeatedly crashing Mac which ended up creating a 250000+ image library which only contained about 40000 actual images (duplicates on duplicates, a nightmare) the library also became broken with corrupted images and other complications. After the Mac was finally replaced I talked to Apple about resolving the issues, they advised the best solution was to export everything and create a new library and import everything and then remove duplication etc. I used the three apps over many weeks to clean up the library but things went wrong again. I have rebuilt the library for the last time and have not used any of the apps on it (when it crashed this time it was already down to about 50000 so not as bad as original) I have removed the images I believed to be broken (but it still contains some where the thumbnail and the image underneath do not match).

From your comment and other posts I have read from you, I was wondering what would be your recommendation on these apps, as you say they are tested, should I painstakingly find each duplicate manually or would one of these apps be better than the others for finding the dupes. I thought this question related to the original post as its about library issues etc but if you think this should be a seperate discussion just let me know. (any hints on fixing thumbnails also gratefully received).

Thanks Angela :-)

I agree wholeheartedly with léonie on this matter. There are a number of apps available that will just remove any duplicate file it finds without regard to what problems the removal might cause.

For what it's worth I've been able to test demo versions of these applications which can identify and safely help remove duplicate photos from a Photos Library:

• Duplicate Annihilator for Photos - $7.95
• PhotoSweeper - $9.99 - Demo version available.
• PowerPhotos - $29.95
• Photos Duplicate Cleaner - Free

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 like the capability to merge Photos libraries or copy photos along with their metadata between libraries.

PhotoSweeper compares bitmaps and/or histograms so it can detect duplicate images even if they have different sizes, file names, sizes and capture dates.

Happy New Year

Yes that is all true and it is also true that several very experienced iPhoto and Photo users have fully tested PowerPhotos (and IPLM) and understand exactly how they handle duplicate elimination (marking the photos so you delete them using Photos (or iPhoto) rather than the program actually deleting them) - PowerPhotos, Duplicate Annihilator for Photos and PhotoSweeper for Photos are tested, safe third party programs for use with Photos -- Several programs like MacKeeper, CleanMyMac and Gemini are known to be very dangerous and should never be used - and since there are at least three tested programs that are safe and do a good job there is no real reason to use any other program than the tested ones

PowerPhotos is a safe and highly recommended program for use with Photos just as IPLM was with iPhoto - in fact it is hard to imagine not having it it is so useful

LN

If you are reading the warning carefully, it says "certain third party apps". This is true for any application that is modifying your Photos Library directly, like CleanMyMac or Gemini. These can damage your Photos Library badly, because they remove original image files directly from the library, and can leave the Photos Library in an inconsistent state.

PowerPhotos, Photo Sweeper, Duplicate Annihilator are not removing any content from your Photos Library, but are using Apple's interface to the Photos.app itself to collect duplicates in an album. And only then you use the Photos .app to remove the detected duplicate photos .

This cannot damage the library.

You are welcome

LN