Choosing keepers manually

While duplicate rules provide a very flexible way to decide which duplicate photos to keep and get rid of, sometimes you may still want to make some decisions yourself, rather than leaving everything up to the automated rules.

You can do this by selecting one or more photos, then clicking either the “Keeper” or “Trash” button at the bottom of the window to mark your selection to either be kept or trashed. Alternately, you can also control-click a photo and use the contextual menu, or press the return key to toggle a photo between keeper and trash.

Note that while duplicate rules will always leave at least one keeper in each duplicate group, if you’re changing actions manually, it is possible to mark all photos from a group to be trashed. Be careful when doing this, since you want to be sure you’re not deleting all copies of a photo unless you really want to get rid of them all.

If you would like to review all selections manually, but would prefer not to have to do it all in one sitting, you can do so like so:

1. Run your duplicate search, then proceed down the list of duplicate groups and confirm your manual selections.
2. When you are ready to stop, select the next photo you haven’t reviewed yet, then scroll all the way to the bottom of the duplicate browser and shift click on the very last photo. This should select all the photos you haven’t review yet.
3. Click the “Keeper” button below the duplicate browser, which will mark all those selected photos to be kept.
4. Click the “Trash Duplicates” button in the upper right to trash the duplicates that you did review.
5. The next time you want to review more, run the same search again and review another batch of photos, marking the rest as keepers. You can repeat this process as desired until you’ve reviewed all your photos.