How do I remove duplicate photos from an album?

You indicate that our are using macOS 13.2, Ventura, which has a built-in duplicate finder. The duplicates are in a folder near the top of the sidebar listed with Library and People, etc. It will show you the two versions and ask if you want to Merge them.

Merging uses the "better" picture with combined keywords and such. You can also just delete (command-delete) the one you don't want, if you wish--it will go into "Recently Deleted," like usual.

In the pictures above, one photo has a title and the other has no title (so its file name is shown.) I might, after looking at the info window (command-i) decide to just delete the untitled one. If the deleted picture was in an album, then the picture would be missing in that album after the deletion. If I merged them, then the better one (maybe the one that's 1.8 MB) would appear in all the albums either had been in, with the keywords from both pictures, and with the title from the first picture.

I include the album name as a keyword in every picture that's in an album. That way when looking at duplicates I can see if they are in the same album or only in different places.

To see a list of photos in an album you could use the free trial version of PowerPhotos. It lets you view your Photos Library in a nice list view, with the metadata arranged in columns. You can easily sort the photos in the album by clicking on any of the column headers. I am using PowerPhotos a lot, as a companion to Photos. The full, paid version can do a lot more, for example move albums between libraries or help to compare libraries.

You can dpwnload the trial version here: https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

swbodager wrote: I already removed duplicates from the library but I want to remove all the duplicated photos in an album.

Like Rich839, I'm confused about "duplicated photos in an album." The Library view shows every picture in the Photos Library. An album doesn't contain pictures-- an album is actually just a list of pictures you want to see together. That's how a picture can be in several albums. Two albums can both have the same picture name in their lists, and that picture will show up when you click either album. And when you delete a picture from an album, its name remains in the lists of other albums. The name never occurs twice in an album's list.

So, it's hard to see how, if there are no exact duplicates in your entire library, a two identical pictures can appear in a single album. If that's what's happening, can you include a screenshot? Shift-Command-4 will let you select a part of the screen.

Do you mean that you want pictures to appear in only one album-- that you don't want a pictures name to appear on the the lists of two different albums? (One powerful aspect of Photos is that, if you have a picture of a Tiger at the San Diego Zoo, you can have that picture's name listed in both a "Wild Animal" album and in a "Zoo" album. )

If that's the case, that you want to keep some pictures from appearing in two album lists, then it turns out that this is hard. However, this first:

Even if I could just see a list view of the photos showing the filenames would allow me to remove the duplicates without having to inspect each photo.

In Photos, unfortunately, you can't get a list of pictures. But there is a very good 3rd Party app, PowerPhotos ($30), which many of us use, that will do this:

This is from PowerPhotos -- you can sort by any of these columns. You can download a trial copy to see if it does what you want.

Let us know...

Control-click on a photo and choose Remove from Album from the pop up menu. You can also select photos as a batch and so the same procedure to remove them all.

I'm using an older version of Photos, but am assuming that the same procedure exists on the newer versions.

-- Rich

Albums contain only thumbnails that refer to the photos in the library. Deleting a photo from the library also deletes it from the album. So, since you removed the duplicates from the library, they shouldn't be appearing in your album.

Since I'm not running Ventura, I can't speak for what features it may have or not have regarding removal of duplicates or listing of duplicates in an album. Richard Taylor's earlier response gave a great explanation of the duplicate removal procedure.

-- Rich

Apparently léonie and I had the same idea...