David- One of the most common problems encountered by Mac users is duplicate photos in their
photo libraries. So today, I’m going to show you how to use one of my favorite
tools which will easily find and remove those pesky dups. Coming up next on Tech talk America.
[LOGO] Hello everyone and welcome to the class. Today
I’m going to teach you how to use my favorite utility for finding and eliminating duplicate
photos; A little app called Power Photos. You can’t get it in the App Store, but I
do have a link for you down below in the video description and you can save yourself 10%
when you use the promo code TECHTALK10 - all one word.
In the interest of full disclosure this is NOT a sponsored video. I only review apps
that I recommend and I’ve been recommending Power Photos to my clients for years. We did
recently start an affiliate relationship, but like I said, I would never do any type
of business with these guys if I didn’t believe in the product.
The big problem that I have with a lot of the other duplicate removing apps out there
is that they do NOT take into consideration whether or not you’ve organized one of the
duplicate photos into an album. So even if it successfully identifies and removes one
of those duplicate photos; it can also screw up the organization of your albums in the
process.
Why do I bring this up, you ask?
Thanks to a new update, if Power Photos discovers that one of those photos has already been
organized into an album it will automatically keep that relationship in tact.
It’s like a therapist for your photo albums.
When you first download Power Photos you’ll initially find it here in your Downloads folder
so you’ll want to start by dragging it and dropping it into the Applications folder.
Now before we proceed there is one setting that you may need to change in Photos in order
to get accurate results. And just to be clear you only need to do this if you use iCloud
to store your photos (which i do recommend).
So let’s now open up the Photos app and if you’re following along at home I want
you to click on where it says photos at the top left and then we’re going to go into
preferences.
From here, let’s switch over to the iCloud tab and while I normally recommend optimizing
your photo library in order to free up space; in order for Power Photos to accurately scan
for duplicates you are going to need to temporarily change this to “Download Originals.”
After you’ve made that change, I want you to go into the main photos library and scroll
to the bottom. You’ll know the download process is done when you see a status message
that says “updated” with a date and time stamp.
And just to be clear, after you’re done running this utility, I strongly encourage
you to come back and change your iCloud setting to optimized. It is a really great way to
prevent accidentally over-stuffing your hard drive.
To run a duplicate scan just click the magnifying glass icon here at the top. You’ll now see
all of the different search options and what I would recommend you do is first start by
first running Power Photos on just the default settings, and depending on the results you
get, I recommend that when you’re done that you come back here again and try running it
with different search parameters.
Part of the reason why this is a good idea is because there are many different ways that
one can end up getting duplicate photos; and the perfect combination of these settings
that works best for you is going to depend on how those duplicate photos got there in
the first place. So for now, let’s just run a first scan on the default settings and
we’ll see how it does.
[MUSIC]
Now that the first scan is over you can see that Power Photos has automatically marked
one photo as a keeper and at least one as a duplicate. Photos that are identified as
“keepers” will have a check box over them and duplicate photos will have a trash can
icon.
You can try selecting different rules in the “Auto Choose Keepers” section, or if you
want to manually choose a different keeper, just select the photo then tap the return
key on your keyboard.
One trick I wanted to mention is that if your vision isn’t what it use to be, you should
know that you can see a full-screen preview of any of these images by simply double clicking
on them.
This right here is the option that I referenced earlier where if you have two duplicate photos,
but one of them in an album; it will replace the deleted photo with the corresponding keeper
in order to keep the album intact.
If your Mac is running MacOS Catalina or later, you can delete the duplicate photos just by
clicking “trash duplicates” at the top right. That being said if your Mac is running
an older operating system, Power Photos will now place all your duplicate photos into an
album called “PowerPhotos duplicate trash”. So if that applies to you, after Power Photos
has finished moving those photos to this album you’re going to want to select all which
you can do by pressing Command A on your keyboard. Then, to send those photos to the trash just
press Command and the Delete key. Keep in mind if you do want to immediately reclaim
that space, you’ll now need to go into recently deleted and select delete all.
You remember how earlier I mentioned that there are several different ways that you
can get duplicate photos? Well, one of the ways this can happen is if you accidentally
import thumbnail images of your photos back into the Photos Library.
So for example if you look at these two images here, you can see that while visually they
are the same image; they have very different file sizes and resolutions. Now in my experience
this type of duplicate situation usually; not always, but usually happens when someone
switches from a PC to a Mac and the tech who transfers the data doesn’t know what they’re
doing. Not that I’m talking about anyone specific….
Cough: Geek Squad
While Power Photos can not automatically remove this type of duplicate since they have different
file names and dramatically different sizes, I would like to teach you a work around. So
what I would recommend you do is select your default library here in Power Photos and then
switch the view settings to list view.
We’re now going to secondary click in this toolbar at the top to reveal a few extra sorting
options and what I would recommend you do is add the option to sort by “size.” Here’s
the reason why.
Because all thumbnails are a fraction of the size of their counterparts, when you sort
your photos by size they’ll naturally all be together. In my experience thumbnail images
are usually under 300kb so look for anything under that amount.
One thing I want you to be aware of, when you go to sort your photos by size, Power
Photos then has to calculate the size of every single photo. So I want you to have the expectation
that when you go to sort your images by size you may need to just let it sit for a minute
to process that data.
Now I’ll just select the first photo in this list, hold the shift key, and then scroll
down and click on the last item. To delete
Once again if your Mac is running an operating system prior to Catalina, instead you can
just secondary click and you should see an option to add these images to an album. From
there, you’ll again just need to navigate to that album, select all, and send those
files to the trash.
Another key feature of Power Photos is the ability to merge multiple photos libraries
into one. We’re not going to dive into that today, but I did want to acknowledge that
other feature because if you have multiple libraries you want to combine, the fact that
PowerPhotos will also remove duplicates as part of the merge process is really appealing.
One other quick note on merging libraries. Depending on how many photos you have, you
may want to temporarily locate your new library on an external hard drive especially if your
Mac is running low on disc space.
Before we go I want to give you a little preview of my video for next week. If you have pre-digital
photos, negatives, or slides that need to be digitized; you’re going to want to tune
in because I’m going to be teaching you how to use a little trio of apps which will
allow you to use your iPhone to digitize them with amazing efficiency. So be sure to check
back.
If this video helped you, you can help me out by hitting the like button and leave me
a little well-constructed comment down below.
Thank you for watching everyone this is David A. Cox with Tech Talk America. Class Dismissed.