I just bought a new MacBook and moved up several OS from my old MacBook. I heard that the OS can find duplicate photos in Apple Photos libraries. How do I activate that feature?
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Original Title: How to
MacBook Air 13″
You don't have to activate it, but you may have to wait for the Mac to finish comparing all the photos to each other before it shows the duplicates it has found.
If you wish to be more proactive and not wait for Photos to complete its scanning you can use one of these apps that will identify the potential duplicates, put them in an album or mark them with a keyword for easy retrieval and deletion by you. You don't want one that does the deletion itself for obvious reasons.
I've run tests on the these two apps with the following results and found them to be safe to use:
PowerPhotos - $40
PowerPhotos is the iPhoto Library Manager version for Photos and is very powerful. Although more expensive I would recommend it as it has more capabilities than the others like the capability to merge Photos libraries or copy photos, both original and edited versions, along with their metadata between libraries.
PhotoSweeper - $15 - Demo version available.
PhotoSweeper compares bitmaps and/or histograms so it can detect duplicate images even if they have different file sizes, file names, image sizes and capture dates.
You will need the paid version of PowerPhotos to find and mark duplicates in a Photos library. It is the best utility for Photos libraries on the market.
However, if you prefer to use the built in duplicate finder of Photos patience is a virtue.
In addition to markwmsn's point, the Duplicates folder is found in Utilities:
in the sidebar.
That folder may not show up until Photos actually finds duplicates to show you-- how that works depends on the macOS, but you didn't say which one you're using.
For Photos, "Duplicates" includes not just exact copies, but also you get pictures which look similar but may have different resolutions or names, etc. The pictures may even look similar to Photos, but have important differences to us. For instance, this pair always shows up for me:
I want to keep them both!
"Merge" lets Photos choose which one to keep, and it puts the kept picture in all the albums that the rejected one was in. Many of us don't trust this completely, and we go through each pair, looking at titles, captions, and keywords, and copying what's necessary to keep the most data.
How to activate duplicate photo detection in Apple Photos on a new MacBook?
