Duplicate tips and tricks

Here are a few tips and tricks that might be helpful when using PowerPhotos 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, make sure you have all the metadata comparison options disabled when you set up your search. This is the most 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, use one of the built-in “Keep duplicates from library X” rule that will mark photos from that library as keepers.
• 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 keywords” rule criteria to prefer the photos that you’ve assigned keywords to over those that you haven’t.
• If none of the built-in criteria exactly match a group of photos you want to always keep (e.g. photos in a particular set of albums, or the results of a complex search), use Photos to assign a custom keyword to the photos you’re interested in (e.g. tag them with a keyword named “Keep”). Then, create a custom duplicate rule with a row reading “Keyword is X” where X is the keyword you assigned to your photos. That will ensure that PowerPhotos keeps the photos you assigned with that keyword over the other photos in the library.
• Nothing will actually be done to your photos until you click the “Trash Duplicates” button when browsing through them, so you can experiment as much as you like with different rules and options.