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I’m using the duplicates feature in PHotos to consolidate duplicates. How can I choose the highest resolution version most effectively wo going into the info for each version? Since my library is in the cloud, I’m guessing doing this doesn’t save much space on my iPad (fourth generation iPad Air 18.1 iOS).
iPad Air, iPadOS 18
Here's a pair of duplicates from South Padre Island:
Resolution is usually in dots per inch (in the US,) and so discussing resolution with these pictures makes no sense until they are actually printed or displayed on a screen. How I print the picture, 8x10 inches or 16x20 inches would determine the resolution.
What Photos can show me is the size of the picture in bytes, kilobytes, or megabytes. This is, more or less, a measure of the information in the picture. If I were going to trash one of these, I would dump the 315 KB (0.315 MB) image, because I could later downsize the 10.5 MB one by taking away information, but I can never get the information back in order to turn the smaller one into the larger one. More information in a picture means more detail, so less fuzzy when expanded.
The info window shows the size of the picture in pixels (the dots in the measure dots/inch-- without the inches, of course) and the approximate file size, the information, in MegaBytes.
For the same number of dots, a simple picture (just a cloudless sky?) would have less information and thus fewer megabytes.
If the pictures are different formats, jpg, heic, tiff, etc, then the way the bytes compare to information will be different, since those formats organize their files differently. Then you just have to look at them closely to see which has more detail.
I maintain a public historical photo album with images from various sources. I very often receive the very same old shot from multiple sources and I always try to pick the best quality version to upload in place of the previous best version.
More often than not the best version does not have the best resolution or has the largest MB size because different compression settings can bloat a low-res image and often a low-res image is just upscaled to a fake high-res image for easy viewing etc. And the same .jpg might have been converted to .png, .tif, .webp as color, B&W, rasterized etc.
So I open a potential new best quality candidate with GraphicConverter and visually compare it to the previous best version with fit-to-window and when zoomed in with the same amount and look for the quality and possible compression artifacts. The same shot is often cropped differently so I sometimes have to include more than one image as the best version.
Weeding out duplicates in Photos by photo resolution
