Two Photo Libraries and Duplicates

Question

Two Photo Libraries and Duplicates

Hello everybody.

I have never quite understood the philosophy of Photo (former iPhoto). It creates many copies and if you have many photos as I have, this issue can be big.

For example, I have an album called Australia 2006 in which there are my photos.

If I go to Library (in which there are ALL my photos), I have this situation, which is pretty messy:

Now, I don't know which duplicate I should be deleting (without loosing the original copy) and I don't know which of these photos are related to the photos I have in my Australia 2006 album.

Furthermore, I figured out that I have two separate Photo Libraries on my Mac and I don't know which is related to my Photo app and if I can delete one of these two libraries and not loosing any of my photos.

Thanks to anyone who can help me on this.

Matteo

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.0

Posted on Dec 9, 2020 12:23 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Yer_Man

Level 10

163,890 points

Dec 9, 2020 12:45 AM in response to Matteo Bossetti

You have one library for the App Photos. You have one for the App iPhoto. According to the screenshot the iPhoto library was migrated to Photos. If you're content that all of the iPhoto images are in Photos the you can delete that iPhoto library.
It's worth noting that you have an Aperture Library as well. As neither Aperture or iPhoto run on Mac OS 11, it's worth considering if you need that too? Are there images within the Libraries not also in Photos?
PowerPhotos can help you deal with duplicates:

https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

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Answer 2

Dec 9, 2020 1:52 AM in response to Yer_Man

Terence,

I've purchased PowerPhotos and the situation is the following:

How can I get rid of the dashed thumbnails and the duplicates? Is there an automation or I have to choose them manually?

Thanks for your help.

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Answer 3

Dec 9, 2020 12:53 AM in response to Yer_Man

Thank you very much for your help.

I'll back up my HD, then I'll delete the iPhoto library. I'll check on Photos that everything is all right.

To manage my photos later on, I'll consider PowerPhotos.

Thanks a lot!

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Answer 4

Dec 9, 2020 1:30 AM in response to Matteo Bossetti

To me, that looks like you have at some point tried to import one entire library into your current photos library.

If you do that, it will create duplicates, because a library contains not only your original image files, but also separate versions for thumbnails and previews.

You can check this by comparing the size of each of the three copies of a photo (size in pixels).

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