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Photos Duplicate finder (photosdup)

P

peter-sk

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 2, 2022
3
6
Hi everyone,
I did not find any software (paid or free) that can handle Photos libraries with around a 100.000 or more images.
I have tried a number, but none of them would scan the entire library effectively in reasonable time.

In the end, I coded my own free solution:

https://github.com/peter-sk/photosdup

I would be interested to know if this solution works for others. And where it breaks down.

The main idea is that it first scales images to 50x50 pixels (as difPy does) and then builds a smart datastructure (a KD tree) that allows finding similar pictures without having to compare all images with each other.

In my case, it helped me to tag approx. 12.000 out of approx. 66.000 images as duplicate using the keyword function of Mac Photos, allowing me to review and delete these images.

Looking forward to your experiences and feedback :)

Peter
 
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peter-sk said:
Hi everyone,
I did not find any software (paid or free) that can handle Photos libraries with around a 100.000 or more images.
I have tried a number, but none of them would scan the entire library effectively in reasonable time.

In the end, I coded my own free solution:

https://github.com/peter-sk/photosdup

I would be interested to know if this solution works for others. And where it breaks down.

The main idea is that it first scales images to 50x50 pixels (as difPy does) and then builds a smart datastructure (a KD tree) that allows finding similar pictures without having to compare all images with each other.

In my case, it helped me to tag approx. 12.000 out of approx. 66.000 images as duplicate using the keyword function of Mac Photos, allowing me to review and delete these images.

Looking forward to your experiences and feedback :)

Peter
Click to expand...

Interesting. I use PowerPhotos for that. My library is 118K items. I had not noticed a major performance problem with dup scanning but i mainly did that when I used it to merge my libraries into one when i finally got a faster Mac. How long does a dup scan take for your library?
 
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Tagbert said:
Interesting. I use PowerPhotos for that. My library is 118K items. I had not noticed a major performance problem with dup scanning but i mainly did that when I used it to merge my libraries into one when i finally got a faster Mac. How long does a dup scan take for your library?
Click to expand...
I just compared. For a library with 16.000 images, PowerPhotos took close to 1 hour (26 minutes for the initial scan +a approx. 30 minutes for generating all the classes etc.). My Python script took 16 minutes.

For larger libraries, the difference grows.

Cheers,
Peter
 
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peter-sk said:
I just compared. For a library with 16.000 images, PowerPhotos took close to 1 hour (26 minutes for the initial scan +a approx. 30 minutes for generating all the classes etc.). My Python script took 16 minutes.

For larger libraries, the difference grows.

Cheers,
Peter
Click to expand...
Nice
 
Hi all,

I found that the (already quite good) performance was basically limited by my SSD's sustained reading speed. I improved photosdup by using the thumbnails pre-computed by the Photos app and by first computing possible duplicates using 10x10 pixel images before using more time on 50x50 pixel images.

With the --thumbs option, it just scanned a library with 26637 photos containing 2576 duplicates (mostly HEIC and JPEG of the same iPhone photos) in 2 minutes and 21 seconds :)

Cheers,
Peter
 
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Does any of those softwares display the containing album? ...and also, can link back the remaining photo of the duplicated to the albums it was taken out of?
 
Screenshot 2022-08-19 at 11.52.35 AM.png

The Option to delete Duplicates
 
Mcrumors David said:
Does it link back the duplicates to the albums? I doubt it ...
Click to expand...
I doubt that any of them do. They would need to design the feature around album merging to do that and I doubt that it is a common enough problem to focus on.

Would it work for you to merge two albums and then run a process to remove duplicates? Would that give you what you want?
 
Tagbert said:
I doubt that any of them do. They would need to design the feature around album merging to do that and I doubt that it is a common enough problem to focus on.

Would it work for you to merge two albums and then run a process to remove duplicates? Would that give you what you want?
Click to expand...

I second that ...

PowerPhotos does remove duplicates and keep albums intact (i.e. link back the remaining photo to the albums from which the duplicates were deleted from) ! (I did not test, but got a reply from Herr Webster)

1660977092989.png


PS: When you have 130k photos, merging around albums - of course - is not an option.
 
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Mcrumors David said:
I second that ...

PowerPhotos does remove duplicates and keep albums intact (i.e. link back the remaining photo to the albums from which the duplicates were deleted from) ! (I did not test, but got a reply from Herr Webster)

View attachment 2045099

PS: When you have 130k photos, merging around albums - of course - is not an option.
Click to expand...
Power Photos has other features, too. It can split and merge photo libraries. I used to do that a lot when using iPhoto as it had a hard time dealing with large photo libraries. Photos seems marginally better in that regard.
 
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peter-sk said:
Hi everyone,
I did not find any software (paid or free) that can handle Photos libraries with around a 100.000 or more images.
I have tried a number, but none of them would scan the entire library effectively in reasonable time.

In the end, I coded my own free solution:

https://github.com/peter-sk/photosdup

I would be interested to know if this solution works for others. And where it breaks down.

The main idea is that it first scales images to 50x50 pixels (as difPy does) and then builds a smart datastructure (a KD tree) that allows finding similar pictures without having to compare all images with each other.

In my case, it helped me to tag approx. 12.000 out of approx. 66.000 images as duplicate using the keyword function of Mac Photos, allowing me to review and delete these images.

Looking forward to your experiences and feedback :)

Peter
Click to expand...
Hi Peter. Thanks for sharing! This looks useful. I'm the author of the PhotoScript package you used to create folders and albums -- glad to see a good use for this! Cheers!
 
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