Unlike years before, everyone’s a photographer now in one way or another. With cameras getting smaller, smarter, and snappier, photography became accessible to the masses. In addition, there is next to no cost of taking and storing pics, which leads to multiple shots of pretty much the same scenery, setting or person with very little difference. Before you know it, with the iCloud sync on, your Photos library is full of duplicates that eat up precious storage space. Want to claim that free space back? Let’s see what options do you have.
Take Photo Cleanup into Your Own Hands
To address the elephant in the room right away, there is no easy way of dealing with picture duplicates on your own. Neither Apple’s newly updated Photos app, nor its predecessor iPhoto, have the functionality that allows for a automated cleanup of identical files. The closest you get is an occasional reminder to prevent you from importing an identical copy to your library.
This means, that there are either of the 2 main routes to take — the tedious manual handpicking of similar or identical pics, or heading down the third-party apps lane that enables automated cleanup.
How to Remove Duplicate Photos in iPhoto Yourself
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to detecting unwanted photos in your library. To get rid of duplicates you will have to go over all photos stored on your Mac manually. While the time it takes to sift through all of your images will vary depending on the number of photos, it may take extra effort to figure out how to put yourself to the task in the first place. After all, the task is beyond tedious, especially considering that iPhoto provides no remover to help.
Yet, this proves to be the most cost-effective way of dealing with redundant pictures if you have a relatively small library. Open Photos app, in Library on the left choose Photos, make sure the Photos tab is selected too, and lastly, set filters to showing All Photos. It sounds quite confusing due to the choice of naming (thanks Apple). Take a look at the screenshot below and double check whether your settings are on point. This will show all images in a single window to make finding duplicates slightly easier.
Simply hit Delete on your keyboard to remove the selected image. At least that’s quick and easy.
Use Duplicate Picture Finder and/or iPhoto Duplicate Cleaner
In order to deal with an immense photos library, it’s recommended to grab a third-party app to help you out. MacFly Pro is an all around option for any Mac user. You are free to choose any app you like, of course, however with MacFly Pro you take no compromises. Simply download and install the app to automatically start your free trial and run a Duplicates scan. What’s great about MacFly Pro, that you aren’t just getting a shot at removing your photo dupes, but the comprehensive system wide scan also detects all sorts of duplicates (including pictures beyond iPhoto) scattered around your system. Once the scan is completed, you can review the files to choose which ones you would like to keep.
The bottom line is that keeping your Photos library intact is quite a job. Not only that it is time-consuming to look back and clean out redundant files, but it requires regular attention in order to be maintained organized afterwards. As a bonus tip, you best pick up the habit of manually importing your photos after you have sorted them out, unless you want to get invested in software to help you clean up the excess.