Think You Have Duplicate Files Or Photos? Maybe Not.

 Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you why those duplicate items you see on your Mac aren't really duplicates.

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So I'm often asked about duplicate items.  Sometimes it's duplicate files. Sometimes it's duplicate photos. People are concerned that their drive space is being taken up with duplicates. Sometimes, of course, these really are duplicates. You may have done something to duplicate the file or maybe sync it twice from a camera. That kind of thing and you end up with items. But very often these aren't duplicates at all. You are simply viewing the same content, one single file or photo, in two different ways and mistaking that for a duplicate file or photo. This could actually be dangerous because if you think it is a duplicate and you delete it thinking you are deleting the second item, you could be deleting the one and only version of that file or photo and you could loose it forever. 

I rarely ever get people asking about duplicate items in the Music App. So I want to use it in a way to help people understand why they may think they have duplicates when they don't. Here I am in the Music App and I'm under My Library and I'm looking at artists and I've got an artist here and I've got music here in an album. Now, what if I were to create a playlist. I'm going to go to File, then New Playlist. I'm going to create this playlist and I'm going to call it My Playlist. Now I'm going to go back here and I'm going to add a song to the playlist by dragging and dropping it there. I'm going to go to another artist there and drag and drop again. Now if you look at that playlist you'll see two songs there. Now rarely does anybody think that there is a duplicate now on their drive. You kind of understand that you've got these songs here in your library and you have simply created a playlist that is just linking to that same content. This is just two ways to play these songs. You can play them from a playlist or you can play them right from the album. They are not duplicates. They are there once. You just have different ways of accessing them. Different ways of viewing the same content. I think the word Playlist helps people understand that this is just a list to other content. It's not duplicating the content when you create a playlist and then add songs to it. 

But now let's go to the Photos App. In the Photos App I hear a lot that people have duplicates and they want to get rid of them. Sometimes they truly are duplicates created through a mistake. But sometimes they're not. For instance if I were to look at some of the these photos here, like say this one and this one, take a look at those. Now let's go to this album called Hike Photos. You could see the same two photos there. The mistake people make is thinking I've got this twice. I could see it here in Library and I could see it here in Hike Photos. I've duplicated this photo. It's taking up twice as much space on my drive. I don't need two copies of this photos. I just want one. But the thing is albums are like playlists. The photo isn't there for a second time. An album is just a way of looking at the same photo. When you go to Library in Photos you can view all of your photos, either grouped by years, months, days, or just a list of all your photos. This shows you the complete contents of your Photo Library. An album just has links to those same photos. So if you were to add these photos to an album it doesn't duplicate them. They are still in your library. But now you have a second way of viewing these photos. You could do it in the Library or you could go to Hike Photos, this album you've created, and then see them gathered together here as well. They are just links to the actual photo which is there one time. 

It's the same for Special Albums here. Like, for instance, there are Media Types here. If I were to look at some of these Media Types, like Portrait Photos, it's going to show me all my portrait photos. I don't have a second copy of each one of these. This one in Portrait Photos and another one, if I go to Library and find it. The same thing when you look in Memories, People, Places, Favorites, and Recents. These will all show you your photos in another way. But there is not a duplicate here. Even imports here just shows you the photos grouped by the times you imported them. This doesn't represent a third copy of this photo. It is just a list here linking to the photos that happen to be imported at this time.

Consider this. If you were to go into an album and then select a photo. Control click it or right click on a mouse or two-finger click on a trackpad, you bring up the Context Menu. One of the items here is Show in All Photos. So you could jump to its location in All Photos. The same thing here in Recents. I could select a photo here in Recents. If I Control click it Show in All Photos so it takes you back to its original location. Now one of the ways this is dangerous is if you go to a place like Recents and you select a photo and then I press the Delete Key. Then it deletes the photo. Well, guess what? It is not deleting it from Recents. It is deleting it from your entire library. There's only one copy of the photo and if you delete it here then you've lost that photo completely. There is no way to edit Recents. Recents isn't a place where you place photos or you remove them. It is simply a list of your most recent photos. Albums, on the other hand you customize. You Add photos to them and you can remove them. Watch what happens when I hit the Delete Key here with this photo selected. It removes it instantly. It doesn't even ask me. Why? Because it is not a dangerous action. I've just removed it from this album. When I go back to Library I can go here and I can see the photos is still there. I haven't deleted the photo from the Library. I simply removed it from the album. As a matter of fact if you were to select a photo here and then go to Image at the bottom of the menu here you could see the Delete Key is matched to Remove One Photo From Album. Whereas if I go to the Library and I select a photo and I go to Image. I look and see where the Delete Key is. It says Delete one photo. So this gives you a clue right here. The same thing in Recents. Remember in Recents if I hit Delete it is actually going to prompt me because it is a dangerous action. If I go to Image and then look for Delete at the bottom it says Delete One Photo. 

Now let's look at Files in the Finder. The same thing happens here in a particular situation. So here I've got my Documents folder. I can look under Projects and I can see the files here. Notice I've got this file right here  Alice.pages. Now let me go to Recents. A lot of people like to go to Recents. It shows you the recent files. Chances are anything you need is probably going to be near the top of Recents. There I could see Alice.pages. Is this a duplicate file? Do I have one copy of the file here under Recents and another copy here under Documents, Projects? No! Recents is showing you a list of your most recent files. This is the same exact file. There's only one copy of it. It's like looking at an album in Photos or a playlist in Music. So if I were to Delete this file from Recents it deletes the file completely. It's gone. If I want to alter Recents so this file isn't included in Recents I can't do it. Recents is not a thing that you can customize by adding or removing files. It is simply a list showing you your most recently opened files. 

The same thing is true if you were to create a Smart Folder in the Finder. The contents of the Smart folder would not be duplicates of those files but links directly to those files. It is just another way to look at the same file. It seems like every few days I notice on the Apple Forums or some other online site or even somebody asking me a question, somebody has misunderstood what Recents is. Gone in and deleted a bunch of stuff here because they feel like they want to cleanup Recents only to discover to their horror that those files are now gone completely because there was only ever one file. It's not a duplicate at all. 

One other place people mistakenly think they might have duplicates is when looking at the Desktop Folder. Because you can go to the Desktop Folder in the Finder here where you can see there is documents, there's Desktop, and you can also see the Desktop Contents on your Desktop. Is this file a duplicate of this file? Not at all. It's the same exact file. You're looking at the Desktop two separate ways. As a matter of fact if I were to open up a New Finder Window and in that New Finder Window go to Desktop I would see the same files three times. Once in this window, once in this window, and once here on the Desktop. I think, for the most part, people understand when they open up two Finder windows and point them to the same location that these are not duplicates but you're looking at the same files. Consider that you can have say a file over here, another one over here, and it's easy to look and then see, well I've got this one file here and I've got a copy of it right there, right. So you're not picking up that this is the same as the contents of the this because you don't see these two other files at that moment. 

So I hope this explains why sometimes you may have real duplicate files or photos created by mistake as opposed to just seeing the same file or photo in two different ways. It's super important to know that the difference, even if you're not interested in tracking down duplicates because it is very easy to delete a photo or a file thinking it is a duplicate when in fact you're deleting the one and only copy of that information.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.