Duplicate comparison options

When copying photos, merging libraries, and searching for duplicate photos, PowerPhotos uses a visual matching algorithm to find duplicate photos by analyzing the photo content to find photos that are visually identical. This will identify cases where the two photos may not be exactly the same, such as when one copy of the photo is scaled down to a smaller size, has been saved in a different format, or has had minor edits performed on it.

In some cases, you may want PowerPhotos to be more strict in what it considers to be a duplicate photo. If you want to narrow down its matches, you can enable one or more of the following options that will look at other aspects of the photo in addition to the content.

• Filename must match: When enabled, PowerPhotos will only match up photos where the filename of the imported photos is the same. This comparison does not include the file extension, so for example “IMG_1234.JPG” and “IMG_1234.HEIC” would be considered the same filename.
• First N characters: Enabling this will only look at the first N characters of the filename. This can be handy when something has been appended to the filename of one of the photos, e.g. “IMG_1234.JPG” vs. “IMG_1234_2.JPG”.
• Date and time must match: Specifies that the date and timestamp of the two photos must be identical, down to the second. Note that in some cases where one of the two photos has been assigned a different time zone, this might make photos that would otherwise be duplicates not get matched up.
• File format must match: Normally, PowerPhotos doesn’t care what format each photos is, such as JPG, HEIC, or PNG, and will just examine the photo content. This means that for example, a JPG and an HEIC version of the same photo will get matched up. If you don’t want this kind of match to happen, enabling this option will only match JPG to JPG, HEIC to HEIC, etc.
• File size must match: This settings restricts matches only to photos whose original file size is identical. Use this setting if you only want to match photos that are truly identical, and have not been resized, edited, or recompressed. This setting is only selectable if the file format option is turned on, since it doesn’t make sense to compare file sizes of files that are of different formats.
• Height & width must match: PowerPhotos’ normal visual comparison algorithm doesn’t care if one copy of the photo is larger than the other, e.g. it will match a smaller thumbnail copy of a photo to the original as a duplicate. If you want to restrict matches to only photos that have the exact same pixel count for height and width, enable this option.