Duplicate tips and tricks

Here are a few tips and tricks that might be helpful when using iPhoto Library Manager to deal with duplicate photos in your libraries.

Make sure to try out the various duplicate detection options to see which settings work best for your particular photo collection. For instance, if you are having some photos which you think should be identified as duplicates but aren’t, try enabling the “Also compare filename + date” option. This is more inclusive, and will identify photos that are not byte-for-byte matches of each other.

Duplicate rules can be very helpful in eliminating the laborious work of going through all the found duplicates and picking which one(s) you want to take action on. Some common examples include:

• If you’re looking through multiple libraries for duplicates, and would prefer to keep duplicates in a particular one of the libraries, make a “Belongs to library” rule that will mark photos from that library as keepers. If you want to trash photos from the other libraries, set the “Nonkeeper” action to “Move to Trash”.
• If you have multiple copies of photos, but have added more metadata to some copies than others (e.g. by assigning keywords, identifying faces, etc.), use a rule based on the metadata that you have assigned to choose the better photos. For example, you could use the “# of faces” rule criteria to prefer the photos that you’ve identified faces for over those that you haven’t.
• Nothing will actually be done to your photos until you click the “Apply” button when browsing through them, so you can experiment as much as you like with different rules and options.
• If you’d like to compare two different sets of rules/settings to each other, you can option-click the “Find Duplicates” button in the toolbar to bring up a second “Find Duplicates” item in the library list. You can give different settings to the two, and quickly go back and forth between the two to see how they differ.
• The “Move to Trash” action only moves the photo to the iPhoto trash, so it doesn’t immediately delete the photos for good. You can always double check the iPhoto trash before emptying it to see if there are any photos you’d rather not get rid of. Also, you do need to empty the iPhoto trash if you want to free up disk space taken up by the duplicate photos.
• If you can’t get everything you want it a single Find Duplicates operation, you can try making multiple passes, with different options chosen on each pass through. In such a scenario, if you use the “Assign “Duplicate” keyword” action on an initial pass, on the second pass you can check the box to ignore photos with the “duplicate” keyword assigned to them. That will let you whittle the set of duplicates down on each successive pass.