Deleting your duplicate photos
Photos does not provide a mechanism for PowerPhotos to directly delete the duplicate photos that it has found, so the final step of deletion must be performed manually. After letting PowerPhotos apply its actions to your duplicate photos, open the library in Photos. Finding the duplicate photos differs depending on which action you told PowerPhotos to apply.
- Add to Album:
- Switch to the Albums view in Photos, by selecting View > Albums from the menu bar or pressing command-3. Alternately, you can show the sidebar using View > Show Sidebar, which will also show the list of folders and albums in the library.
- Look for a folder named “PowerPhotos Duplicates” and open that folder. That will contain one or more albums named according to the date and time you performed your duplicate search, e.g. “3/16/15, 11:28 AM (Nonkeepers)”. If you applied an action to both keepers and nonkeepers, you will see two separate albums labelled as such.
- Select the most recently dated album, which will contain all the photos that PowerPhotos identified as duplicates.
- Assign Keyword:
- Click in the search field in Photos and type in the word “duplicate”.
- After waiting for the search to finish, the menu that appears should contain a result for the term “duplicate” labelled “Keyword” underneath.
- Select that result, and that will show you all the photos that have been marked with the “duplicate” keyword.
Then, to delete the photos
- Select the photos you would like to delete (command-A will select all the photos currently being shown).
- Press command-delete to delete the photos (pressing delete without the command key will only remove the photos from the album, without deleting them from the library itself)
- This will remove the photos from the library, but the photos themselves will not be deleted from your hard drive for 30 days (this is a safety feature provided by Photos to allow undoing accidental deletions). If you need to free the disk space used by these photos right away, select File > Show Recently Deleted, then click the “Delete All” button to delete the photos permanently.