Hands-On Tech 228 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. Let's take a look at how we can deduplicate photos on macOS. Stay tuned. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech.
This is the show where you write in with your tech questions and I, Mikah Sargent, answer them. Our question this week comes in from Ryan, who needs some help with de-duping photos on macOS. Ryan writes I'm in the process of cleaning up my Mac photo library. Photos has found almost 15,000 duplicate photos. It takes three clicks per photo to merge them. That will require a lot of clicks. I'm wondering if you could recommend an automated de-duping app. I see there are a lot out there, but would prefer to get a recommendation from someone who has actually used the app before. I don't mind paying for a great app, but free is a very good price. I'm sure you have probably covered this topic before. If so, could you point me to the show or episode? Thank you, Ryan. We've mentioned different options over the course of time, but I think the best way to answer your question is right here on this show. Definitely, that manual process would be grueling of going through and trying to de-dupe all of those photos.
There are some options out there and I want to start with some paid options. The first one I want to mention is an app called PhotoSweeper X. PhotoSweeper works directly with your photos library, so it can sort of pull that in and look for duplicate photos, and it of course has some smart detection features built in. So what it'll do, on top of just looking at oh, this has the same file name, it's going to look at the photos and see the metadata and also compare the photos themselves to look for duplicates. You can preview everything before deleting, and there are loads of different matching criteria that you can set up. So you can decide okay, no, this is not what I want when it comes to trying to get the duplicates, or, yes, I want to do this when I'm trying to get the duplicates. And it does have some built-in safety features to make sure that you don't delete photos that you don't intend to. PhotoSweeper is available in the Mac App Store for $14.99, so you can pick it up from there, and that would help you with being able to make those changes.
Now there's another option, and it's the one that we have talked a lot about on different shows, and that is because the folks at Mac Paul make great software. It's called Gemini 2, and it is called the Gemini 2, the duplicate finder. It's available for $20. It's actually available to download for free. You give it a go and then it's $20 a year.
But with Gemini it goes past just being a photo duplicate finder. It is the all-in-one duplicate finder. So it will find files, it will find all sorts of stuff that you may have duplicates of, and it does a really good job of the non-obvious duplicate detection. So if you have photos that are very similar perhaps you took six photos at a time and five of them are blurry, one of them is good it can help you find those as well and you can basically say I trust you to do your job and then it will get rid of those duplicates without you having to go through and click, click, click, click, click, click, click. It has some visual comparison tools built in so that you can do that as well. And it's again it's been one that I've used for so long as a dedupe system, again across my entire Mac, not just photos but also files. Sometimes I'll throw it at my network attached storage and find times where I just had dragged something over two or three times, not realizing that you know I've got multiple copies of it. It's fantastic. It also has a feature where you can start looking for duplicates and then, if you need to pause for whatever reason, it can kind of pick back up where it left off, as opposed to needing to completely restart, which is great. And for you with 15,000 duplicates in your photo library, I have to imagine that you've got quite the system, or rather quite the large file size, in place. So being able to look through that photo library and, if you need to, you know, kind of get back some of your performance momentarily, being able to do that is great.
Now there's also a free and open source tool that you can use. I've made use of it a couple of times. I have also suggested it to people who were a little bit price sensitive, and it works well. It's a little bit more technical and it works well. It's a little bit more technical, so you're going to kind of need to read through the instructions and make sure that you understand what you're doing with it, but it's very, very powerful.
Dupe Guru is the name of the application Again, free and open source. It can work with the photos library. It can work with other photo library. Basically, you the process of understanding how to use the application. It's kind of it's very easy to follow through the process and get done what you need to get done, whereas with Dupe Guru you are going to you probably have a little bit of a learning curve. So it kind of depends on what you feel your time is worth in those situations.
But perhaps you start with Dupe Guru and then, if you decide to take the plunge, go for Photo Sweeper or Gemini 2. I think they're both great options and then, of course, dope Guru as the free option, also great. It's just all depending on what your preferences are and what you feel you're able to get out of it when it comes to duplicate finding, because if you're just trying to find literal duplicates of a file, in this case a photo, then some of these tools are going to make that happen a lot easier. But if you're also kind of trying to clear out photos that you don't need anymore because you took six photos in a row, then that's where you're going to need a more powerful tool rather than the free one. Now, regardless of which app you choose, I just want to remind you, dear Ryan, please, please, do a complete backup of your photos library first, if you're using Time Machine, that's a great way to start, but also clone that to an external drive if you can. 15,000 photos or more, and probably more if those are just the duplicates then you really, really, really, really want to make sure that you've got all of those photos backed up, all those memories backed up somewhere else, before you throw a program at it that's going to start deleting everything. You really want to protect that. So that's my suggestion for you, Ryan, and thank you for your question.
This is something that a lot of people deal with trying to figure out how to cut down on their photos library. I want to mention for people who aren't familiar with that, as Ryan said, there is the built-in duplication finding tool, where you simply ask photos to look for duplicates in your photos library. Now, as Ryan pointed out, it can be kind of bothersome when you are trying to find those duplicates, or rather, trying to select those duplicates and have them properly appear for deletion, and so be mindful of that as you're going through, that maybe for you the tool is not the built-in duplicate finder, but instead is something more powerful, like one of these tools To access duplicates in your Photos library. You launch the Photos app and underneath the collections option, there's an album essentially called Utilities, and within Utilities is an option called duplicates and that will allow you to do those duplicates. Now you can always, if you want to, Ryan, go into that duplicates section, hold down, command and press A to select all of the duplicates and then simply choose to merge them, which will let you merge all of the items into one. Not all of the items into one, but each of the duplicate, each of the instances of the duplicates being found, will be merged into one.
Interesting that I have precisely 666 duplicates. I don't know what that means, but that is the number of duplicates I have in my photos library Spooky, but yes, if you feel like you can trust the system to do the duplicate finding for you, then this is a way to cut down on those duplicates by selecting them all at once. Should I hit merge, oh, merge 318 exact copies only. We did it and we'll see what the oh. It's going to take 94 hours to merge all of my duplicates. I'm left with 348 that are nearly exact copies, but some of them are smaller size.
So, Ryan, there's the answer to your question. Of course, as always, I recommend write in with what you end up doing. There's the answer to your question, of course. As always, I recommend write in with what you end up doing. We'd love to hear that. If you decided to go with PhotoSweeper and you think it's fantastic and it worked perfectly for you, always love to hear that.
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0:13:13 - Leo Laporte
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