This makes deduplication a really important skill to understand and master. Over the years, our iPhones and Macs have changed in a few ways that make our hard drives fill up with duplicates. Photosweeper currently sells for $10 on the Mac App Store.The process of cleaning up or getting rid of duplicates is called deduplication. But I'm too much of a digital hoarder to take that step! This is really good for when you snapped 15 pics of the same thing so that one might turn out ok. At no point did I get that sinking feeling of "there is no undo."įinally, I should mention that Photosweeper also has a "photo similarity" mode that finds not only duplicates, but very similar series of photos. It does this in a very accountable, safe way. 34GB is nothing to sniff at and getting rid of those duplicates is the first step to consolidating all my files. In all, I was really impressed with Photosweeper. Lesser software might have moved all the iPhoto files to the OSX Trash, leaving the iPhoto library broken. Once you bite the bullet, it does exactly the right thing with every duplicate: iPhoto duplicates get put in the iPhoto Trash, Lightroom duplicates get marked "Rejected" and put in a special "Trash (Photosweeper)" collection, and filesystem duplicates get moved to the OSX Trash. This is in stark contrast to iPhoto's lame "hey, this is a duplicate file" dialog that shows you two downscaled versions of the images with no further information. Click on each file and the full path (even within an iPhoto or Aperture library) becomes visible. Best of all, this view shows everything you need to make sure you're not deleting a high-res original in favour of the downscaled version you emailed your family: filename, date, resolution, DPI, and file size. It places duplicates side-by-side, marking which photo it will keep and which it will trash. If a duplicate was found within iPhoto, it should keep the most recent one.īut, third, what makes Photosweeper truly useful: it won't do a thing without letting you review everything, and it offers a great reviewing interface. In my case, I told it to keep iPhoto images first (since these are most likely to have ratings, captions, and so on), then Aperture, then whatever's on my HDD somewhere. Second, it lets you automatically define a priority for which version of a duplicate photo to save. First, it is happy to look at all the sources I mentioned above, and compare pics across them. There's a lot to love about Photosweeper. (I was too excited to take screenshots of the process, unfortunately!) I used it yesterday to clear 34GB of wasted space on my HDD. Thankfully, there is an excellent OSX app called Photosweeper made for just this purpose. So, the first step to photo sanity is to get rid of these duplicates. A lot of these might be duplicated because, for example, you were just trying out Lightroom and didn't want to commit to it so you put your pics there but also in Aperture. You should definitely read those.īut, while Apple and/or Dropbox get their act together (I'm not holding my breath), you have to make sense of your photos in your Pictures folder, in your Dropbox Photos folder, in various other Dropbox shared folders, on your Desktop, in your Lightroom, Aperture, and iPhoto collections, and so on. Peter Nixey has an excellent post on the disappointing state of affairs (to put it kindly) and an excellent follow-up on how Dropbox could fix it. This eats up precious storage space and makes finding that one photo an exercise in frustration. As new cameras, software, and online storage and sharing services come and go, our collections end up strewn all over the place, often in duplicate. It's no secret that the photo management problem is a huge mess.
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