How does Photos handle duplicates with different file names?

[M. Malone]

Hello,

So I’ve come across an old external HD with a photos stash I forgot about. There are thousands of photos in there.

Some of these photos I already have on Photos app, but a good chunk I do not. If I simply drag and drop these into Photos, will it be able to detect duplicates? I did a spot check and the duplicates have different file names to what’s in Apple Photos.

How does Photos detect duplicates? Does it look at the image or just the file name?

Thank you.

 

[DarkPremiumCho]

Photos uses these to detect duplicates:

- file checksum/hash
- metadata
- neural hash by machine learning algorithms
- this identifies photos that may not be exact duplicates but are very similar

 

[M. Malone]

Awesome. Thank you!