Duplicate photos not detected - MacOS / IOS

I've recently moved all my photos to iCloud as well as creating a Shared library with another iCloud user. The whole process saw an increase from around 60K photos on my Mac to 90K photos in the iCloud library. This is due to a huge amount of duplicates appearing. Unfortunately these aren't being detected as duplicates as the file formats are different (HEIC & JPG). I spoke to Apple support and they said there is nothing I can do other than remove them manually. This of course is a huge manual task and most probably not achievable.

I wondered if anyone knew of a way to get around this - i.e. identify and/or remove the duplicates despite the differing file format.

Posted on Feb 6, 2023 04:08 AM

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Posted on Feb 8, 2023 07:24 AM

The duplicates were created because I merged my Photo library on my Mac with my iCloud library. There had been a lot of importing of photos over time hence creating different file formats.


I wondered if it is purely the size of of my iCloud library (90K photos) that is causing the lack of found duplicates. As a check I created a couple of exact duplicates but the duplicate function is still not picking them up (on any of my devices).


Manually deleting around 30K photos is really not a possibly so any ideas would be gratefully received :-)

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Feb 8, 2023 07:24 AM in response to gee1617

The duplicates were created because I merged my Photo library on my Mac with my iCloud library. There had been a lot of importing of photos over time hence creating different file formats.


I wondered if it is purely the size of of my iCloud library (90K photos) that is causing the lack of found duplicates. As a check I created a couple of exact duplicates but the duplicate function is still not picking them up (on any of my devices).


Manually deleting around 30K photos is really not a possibly so any ideas would be gratefully received :-)

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Duplicate photos not detected - MacOS / IOS

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