How to mass delete duplicate albums in Photos and prevent future duplications?

Jerryws1431 wrote: …nIn each of the duplicated albums the pictures are the same, and the File>Show in Album result shows each of the duplicated albums.

Ok-- so the pictures aren't duplicated. Photos' Duplicates doesn't guarantee that, but the "Show in Album" indicates that you have only one set of pictures. So this could be relatively easy.

1. [Optional] Make a new folder (File>New Folder,) label it "good" or something, and put one copy of each album there. This isn't really necessary, but it might make it easier to be sure you got them all and not extras. Ignore this step if you don't think you need it.
2. Make a new folder and label it "bad"
3. Put all the bad albums in there. Be sure you've left 1 good copy outside of the "bad" folder, maybe in the "good" folder if you did that.
4. Right click on the "bad" folder and choose Delete. The warning that comes up will tell that you will be deleting all the albums inside the folder. For some reason it does not also say that it won't delete any pictures, but it won't.

I tired this, of course-- it seems so simple that nothing should go wrong. Deleting albums and folders does not delete pictures, but "delete" means "move to recently deleted," so you could check, anyway. If you're uncomfortable, you can try a few albums and see how it goes-- that's what I did.

What do you think?

I had only duplicate albums twice, but a long time ago. It happened, when I enabled iCloud Photos on a very old iPad, which still had iOS 9 installed. Then all albums synced from the iPad to the Mac, in addition to the albums already there on the Mac. I had to delete the redundant albums manually, because restoring from a backup has not been an option, as the albums had been syncing to iCloud. I would vape had to clear iCloud Photos as well.

The problem never occurred, when the system versions on my iOS devices and the Macs whereof the same age and more compatible.

Are you using iCloud Photos?

Albums don’t contain anything and are akin to a playlist in the Apple Music app, so deleting the albums themselves is harmless.

The photos are kept in the Photo library, and the albums do not duplicate the photos.

Deleting the photos deletes them from the photo library, and from any albums including that photo.

It would be helpful if you told us what macOS you're using.

How many albums are duplicated? Is that all of them?

Also, when you say duplicate albums-- are the pictures themselves duplicated? Do you see duplicate pictures in the Library view? In Library view, if you pick one of the pictures and do "File>Show in Album" what does it show? Does it show that this picture is in all the duplicated albums?

How to handle this will depend on if the pictures are duplicated or not.

That looks like a promising approach, Richard. I would also check, if the number of photos in the albums with the duplicate names is the same. If different, I would keep the version with more items.

When I had duplicate or multiplied albums on my Mac there were slight differences with respect to the items in the albums with identical names, as if the duplicates had been restored from an older version of the iCloud Photos Library.

léonie wrote: …I would also check, if the number of photos in the albums with the duplicate names is the same. If different, I would keep the version with more items.

Good point! Especially since we have no idea where these duplicates came from!

Jerryws1431 wrote: … How did the duplications happen in the first place? Want to avoid a repetition at all costs.

Well, I have no idea. Have you been poking around inside the Photos Library Package?

Do you have some other app that can manipulate Photos, like PowerPhotos?

Do you have a cat?

Really, there could be an endless guessing game with no firm results.

Are you syncing this library with anything else?