Duplicate photos not being automatically identified in Photos for Mac

I upgraded to macOS Ventura (13.2.1) in January and was pleased to find the Duplicates facility in Photos (v. 8.0). Having 25,000 photos in my Photos Library on my iMac 24" M1, I was soon aware that it could take a while to undertake the search for duplicates. Eventually, a total of 42 were identified and I used the merge facility to resolve all these except for two (very similar photos but not duplicates).


However, I also later identified a number that the system had not picked up, so I have spent the last few days manually identifying a further 288 duplicates so far. These are waiting for me to find the time to process them.


In researching a possible reason for the problem, I found one website (https://macpaw.com/how-to/duplicate-photo-finder-for-mac ) which included the statement:


“When you import your pictures, the Photos app automatically detects duplicates, but it won’t help you with the ones already in your library. For those images already in your photo library, you’ll have to take a more manual approach.”


I can find no reference to verify this statement anywhere, particularly on the Apple Photos web page. I query whether the statement can be true since all the duplicates which had been automatically identified were already in the Photos Library having been imported some time ago. These were a combination of those taken digitally and those scanned in.


Could anyone shed some light on the statement above and/or suggest why the 288 duplicates found manually had not been picked up automatically?

iMac 24″, macOS 13.2

Posted on Feb 24, 2023 06:52 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 24, 2023 01:23 PM

When duplicates are added to a library it will take a while to detect them. With a 7500 photo library with a number of videos it took over a day to get the duplicates into the Duplicates folder. If you have lots of videos understand each frame of each video is checked also.


There is a couple of 3rd party duplicate finder apps:


You want an app 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 - $29.95  

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 - $9.99 - 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.


PowerPhotos is probably the best support tool for Photos.


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2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 24, 2023 01:23 PM in response to richardd49

When duplicates are added to a library it will take a while to detect them. With a 7500 photo library with a number of videos it took over a day to get the duplicates into the Duplicates folder. If you have lots of videos understand each frame of each video is checked also.


There is a couple of 3rd party duplicate finder apps:


You want an app 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 - $29.95  

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 - $9.99 - 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.


PowerPhotos is probably the best support tool for Photos.


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Duplicate photos not being automatically identified in Photos for Mac

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