How Does Apple Photos Determine Duplicates?

[purdnost]

Does Apple Photos do a pretty effective job of weeding out genuinely duplicate photos and videos? I’m trying to consolidate my entire media library into iCloud and I have a few hard drives with duplicate photos. I guess I just don’t want to delete any photos that aren’t duplicates, or add any photos that are. I’m assuming Photos looks at filename, file size, date, other metadata... Also, if my library does display duplicates, what’s the best way to determine which is the better version? Interested in others’ experiences with this.

 

[Moriend87]

Does Apple Photos do a pretty effective job of weeding out genuinely duplicate photos and videos? I’m trying to consolidate my entire media library into iCloud and I have a few hard drives with duplicate photos. I guess I just don’t want to delete any photos that aren’t duplicates, or add any photos that are. I’m assuming Photos looks at filename, file size, date, other metadata... Also, if my library does display duplicates, what’s the best way to determine which is the better version? Interested in others’ experiences with this.

Is this an option on the iPhone? I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the option?

 

[purdnost]

Is this an option on the iPhone? I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the option?

Sorry. I forgot to specify that this is during the import process in Photos fof macOS.

 

[Ledgem]

My experience with Photos' duplicate abilities is a bit mixed. It seems to detect quite a few of them, but then I've also imported some duplicates (edited photos, I can't recall if they retained EXIF information or if it was stripped) and Photos didn't catch them. I don't know exactly what criteria it looks for, but it seems to err on the side of caution.

If you do find duplicates within Photos, there's no way to view two images side by side (which also makes it very difficult when trying to determine what to keep when you have a sequence of photos that are incredibly similar). If they're true duplicates then it shouldn't really matter which one you delete.

In theory, there is a piece of software called PhotoSweeper that should do exactly what you're looking for. It claims to be able to work within a Photos library, but you can also run it on other locations. That might save you some time, if you run it across all of your drives and deal with duplicates before importing into Photos. I haven't used it yet (I'm still consolidating photos as well), but it seemed to receive fair reviews when I was originally looking for a solution to this problem. It has a free trial, too. Probably worth checking out.

 

[purdnost]

My experience with Photos' duplicate abilities is a bit mixed. It seems to detect quite a few of them, but then I've also imported some duplicates (edited photos, I can't recall if they retained EXIF information or if it was stripped) and Photos didn't catch them. I don't know exactly what criteria it looks for, but it seems to err on the side of caution.

If you do find duplicates within Photos, there's no way to view two images side by side (which also makes it very difficult when trying to determine what to keep when you have a sequence of photos that are incredibly similar). If they're true duplicates then it shouldn't really matter which one you delete.

In theory, there is a piece of software called PhotoSweeper that should do exactly what you're looking for. It claims to be able to work within a Photos library, but you can also run it on other locations. That might save you some time, if you run it across all of your drives and deal with duplicates before importing into Photos. I haven't used it yet (I'm still consolidating photos as well), but it seemed to receive fair reviews when I was originally looking for a solution to this problem. It has a free trial, too. Probably worth checking out.

Thanks for your insight. Do you have any experience uploading RAW images? For some reason, it's taking at least am hour to upload each RAW image over a 250 Mbps upload connection. Do you know if there's a simple way to move all RAW images out of the current library and into a new one? They're holding up my syncing process, big time.

 

[Ledgem]

Thanks for your insight. Do you have any experience uploading RAW images? For some reason, it's taking at least am hour to upload each RAW image over a 250 Mbps upload connection. Do you know if there's a simple way to move all RAW images out of the current library and into a new one? They're holding up my syncing process, big time.

Sorry, I don't have a great answer to your questions. I don't use iCloud functionality with Photos beyond Photostream, and while I do have JPEGs and RAWs in my library, short of doing something like exporting all originals, taking out the RAWs, and then re-importing the JPEGs, I'm not sure how to single out the RAW files. It's a big limitation of Photos compared with other DAM software, for sure.