Duplicate images in Photos suck up disk space and can mess up your viewing experience. There was a time when you needed a third-party tool to find duplicates so you could decide how to manage them. But Apple provides a tool to find duplicate images in Photos and decide how to handle them. Here’s how to find and manage duplicate images in Photos.
Apple allows to choose what to do with each pair of duplicate images or you can clean them all up at once.
To find and fix duplicate images in your Photos library:
- Go to the Photos app on your Mac.
- Go to the Edit menu, choose Utilities and then click on Duplicates.
You may also see Duplicates in the sidebar in the Photos app. If there are no duplicates in your library, the menu or sidebar options won’t appear.
- You can select each detected duplicate and decide what to do.
Photos will not only look at the images themselves but also the metadata. Photos contain metadata including when they were created, the device used and the location.
If you choose to merger the images, Photos will retain the best quality image and move the other version to the Recently Deleted folder where you have 30 days to recover it.
- If you have lots of duplicates (I had over 700 on my main system), you can use the Command-A shortcut to select them all and to merge all the copies at once.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.