8/4/23
9:00 am

Finding Duplicate Photos in the Photos App

Recent new features in the Mac, iPhone and iPad Photos apps let you find and remove duplicate photos easily.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can find and remove duplicate photos.
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Now in macOS Ventura and iOS 16 in iPad OS16 we have a new feature in the Photos App that allows us to find duplicate photos and easily remove them if they are, in fact, duplicates. Now to use this functionality all you need to do is go in the Photos App and look on the left. Under Photos you should see a section called Duplicates. If you don't see any sections under photos you can click the Disclosure triangle to the right of Photos to reveal all of this. Then all you need to do is click Duplicates. 
Now what if you don't see duplicates here on the left. That could be simply because Photos has not found any duplicates. Or it could also mean it hasn't had the time to find them yet. You've only recently upgraded to macOS Ventura or iOS or iPad OS 16 then perhaps it hasn't had enough time to actually go through your photos in the background and look for duplicates. This is especially true if you're in the habit of shutting down your Mac the minute you're done with it and only starting it up when you want to start using it again. I always teach people to let your Mac sleep so it can do things like this in the background when you're not using it. 
So assuming you have duplicates you'll see it here on the left and when you click it you'll get this list here showing you all of your duplicate photos. You can scroll through them to see them. Now, each duplicate is shown with a size and a thumbnail. So you can quickly compare them to see if they are, in fact, the same thing. In some cases maybe you've got two different versions of a file. Like here is one I have that's probably the original at 1.5 megs and here is one that probably is one I edited or somehow compressed in another app and then brought it into Photos later on. You could see it is smaller.  The same thing down here. Up here I've got two photos that appear identical and I probably just imported a duplicate by accident. You could always double click on these to get a better view and then you could use the back button here to go back or you can use the right arrow to go to the next one. You can actually go through all of your duplicate photos this way.
So you can see I'm going through six of nine, seven of nine, eight of nine and so on. So you can kind of compare using the left and right arrows and see if they are in fact duplicates. Sometimes it may catch two photos that you took in rapid succession and they are slightly different. But you still may want to delete one of them in that case. 
Now while viewing your duplicates like this you can actually press the delete key and delete one of the photos. Or you can simply select one of the two of them here in this view and press the delete key to delete it. So this way you can choose which one you want to keep. For instance in this case I probably want to delete the more compressed or smaller one and keep this one. 
Now you can also just click the Merge button here. When you do what it's going to do is take either the best quality version, so in this case the larger one, or just the first one that appears here. If they're exactly the same then of course it doesn't matter which one it takes because they are identical anyway. Now also note when you merge two items there's more going on than just deleting one of the two. For instance, what if you put one in one album and one in another album. Well when you merge you only get one photo. But it will be in both albums. The same is true for Tags. If you've tagged one with certain key words and the other with certain key words then the one that will result from the merge will have all of those tags. 
So Photos handles all of that stuff in a logical way. Now notice here sometimes you'll get more than one. So in this case I actually have three copies of this that I have intentionally put in my Photos Library so you could see what happens. I can simply merge all three and it would just keep the larger one or I could select individual ones and press the delete key just to delete that one if I want. 
Now one of the questions I know I'm going to get is what if I know I have duplicates but they are not showing up in here. Well, it could be that it simply has not had enough time to find those particular duplicates. Another reason people will ask me this question is because they think they have duplicates when they really don't. So, for instance, if I look under Albums here and I go to my album called Slideshow I can see the photos in there. Note this photo of flowers and this photo of a path. Now if I go to my album called Wallpapers note that I have the same photo of flowers and the same photo of a path here. But these aren't duplicates. Albums are linking to the one photo that's actually in your library. So if I select this photo here and Control Click it, right click it, or two-finger click on a trackpad and show in All Photos I can see right here I just have it once in my library. Albums allow you to organize things so you can have the same one photo in multiple albums. So, for instance, this can be in an album for my trip to Hawaii but also in an album I make of beautiful flower photos. 
Now one thing I want to talk about when it comes to merging your duplicate photos. You can, of course, select each individual one and just delete that one that you want. You could also click the Merge button here to have it done automatically for you. Another thing you can do is you can select all of these, either by clicking on one and then, say, Shift Clicking on another and it select a range just like it does anywhere else in macOS. Then you've got a button here that says Merge and it gives you the total number of items. So I would end up with only one of these, one of these, and one of these. Three photos if I clicked that button. I could also do Command A to select All and you could see everything selected and I can merge them all. So if you wanted to do this quickly you could go to the Duplicates Section here. Do a quick Command A and then click the Merge button. However, I recommend against it. It's a good idea to look at what you've got going on. Delete the ones that you want to delete. Maybe check to see if they are, in fact, identical photos. 
Also, maybe get a handle on why you have duplicates in the first place. If you just have a handful of them, like this, it's probably due to an occasional accident. But if you have a ton of duplicates then you want to think about maybe what you're doing to create the problem. Like perhaps you're using iCloud but you're also still importing directly from your iPhone using a cable creating the second copy of them. Or maybe you're importing from a SD card from a camera but you're not deleting the photos once you import them. Then next time you import them you're ignoring the little notice that there are duplicates there and importing them anyway. By going through these manually hopefully it will help you prevent having duplicates in the future. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 15 Responses to “Finding Duplicate Photos in the Photos App”

Ken

9 months ago

Always great tips. I still import photos from phone through a cable attached to MacBook. The problem: Once I attach the phone about a thousand photos from phone show up on the MacBook screen. I try to import weekly. I do not like to import through cloud and I do not store photos in iCloud. Out of the thousand photos I usually only need to import the last 100. All of the other photos have already been downloaded to MacBook. Any way to stop seeing the photos I have already downloaded?

Gary Rosenzweig

9 months ago

Ken: Look carefully at the top of the Import screen in Photos and there should be options there to allow you to only look at photos not yet imported.
But note that you need to figure out what you are doing as well. Back years ago before iCloud it was normal to import new photos from your iPhone's "Camera Roll" to your Mac and then delete them from your iPhone. Then those photos would sync back to your iPhone according to your syncing preferences (All Photos, some albums, etc). If you are going to stick with not using iCloud for Photos, then keep this in mind.

Ken

9 months ago

Thanks for fast response. At the top of menu I see were the option for photos not yet imported. Under the "New Items" it states I have 17,000+ photos to import. Clearly I have imported these pictures, but it still states that these are new and option tom import. I brought it up at the apple store once and they couldn't give me an answer.I need to wait the few minutes for all photos to load then scroll to the bottom and select the latest photos. Since new Mac the photos I have imported from phone

Ken

9 months ago

Since new mac the photos I have imported from phone do not show up to "re"import.

Gary Rosenzweig

9 months ago

Ken: Sorry, I don't know why it isn't working properly for you.

Debbie

9 months ago

Hi Gary,
I have found that the photos I shoot on my iPhone while videotaping (by tapping the white button on the screen) don’t show up under the Duplicates tab. I tend to shoot a lot of these causing me to have 10-20 still shots for every video I shoot. They’re taking over my Photos app because I shoot a lot of videos, so it would be so convenient to be able to merge them under Duplicates. Any idea why I can’t?

Gary Rosenzweig

9 months ago

Debbie: Not sure what you mean. Are getting more than one photo when you tap the button? If you are tapping the button at different times, then those would be different photos, not duplicates, right?

Jamie

9 months ago

Thanks, I found the duplicates, but before I merge how do I know if I’m deleting a duplicate in the ALL photos app, or a duplicate I’ve put in an album? Can I find the location of the duplicate before I merge/delete?

Gary Rosenzweig

9 months ago

Jamie: Albums are lists of photos that are in All Photos. They are not duplicates. You don't create a duplicate by putting a photo in an album. They are like playlists in Music. The location of ALL photos is in your one and only "All Photos" list. When you merge two photos, the remaining photo would be in any album where you had either photo.

Jason

9 months ago

Gary -- thanks. this is a great feature and I have been enjoying tidying up my collection of photos. But it's not clear to me how Photos merges the metadata including the captions. How would it merge two different captions of duplicate photos?

Gary Rosenzweig

9 months ago

Jason: I think it may append one to the other. But you can always try it. Duplicate a photo, put different captions on each, then wait until they appear in Duplicates and merge. That's exactly what I would do. Report back with the results.

Michael Ross

9 months ago

Gary - I may be nuts but when I open DUPLICATES it appears there is a duplicate of each photo. The original is there along with a much smaller in bytes duplicate that appears to be a thumbnail.

Does that make sense? If so how do get the DUPLICATES folder to only show true duplicates - not thumbnails?

Under settings I auto upload and store all photos in iCloud. I also 'DOWNLOAD ORIGINALS to.this MAC'. I have tons of space on the drive.
Thanks,
MIKE Ross

Gary Rosenzweig

9 months ago

Michael: Maybe your camera is set to accompany each photo with a thumbnail version? Or maybe at some point you duplicated them in another app? Impossible for me to say since I can't see it. But get to the bottom of it so it stops happening.

Jonathan

6 months ago

I updated to Sonoma about a week ago. I keep my Mac Studio on all the time as you suggest. And I have only 2600 photos. My wife has about 10 times as much as I do and we share the computer with different accounts. I still do not have a Duplicate folder in my Photo sidebar. A couple of days ago I duplicated one of the photos in my library as a test and I still do not have a Duplicate folder. Any suggestions?

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Jonathan: Sorry, I don't know why it isn't showing up as a duplicate. You'll need to contact Apple Support to investigate further.

Finding Duplicate Photos in the Photos App

Comments: 15 Responses to “Finding Duplicate Photos in the Photos App”

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