Bug report using Find command in Terminal with md5 getting duplicate md5 hash tags for completely different photos

I am using the find command in terminal for getting unique md5 tags for all my photos in my personal directory (not Photos APP)




the commands I am using are:




find "$(pwd)" -type f  -print0 | xargs -0  md5 -r > md5listing.txt




and




find "$(pwd)" -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.jpeg" -o -iname "*.png" -o -iname "*.gif" -o -iname "*.tiff" -o -iname "*.bmp" -o -iname "*.heic" \) -print0 | xargs -0 md5 -r 2>/dev/null > md5listing.txt






While I was eyeballing the listed output from the Cat md5listing.txt command I noticed that there were a bunch of entries that had identical md5 tags??? I checked the actual photos (some) and they were different photos. I copied a small subset of the photos over to a separate directory (in the interest of submitting a bug report) and lo and behold the md5 tags were unique - I went back to the original folder and re-entered the command and this time the duplicate md5 tags moved to a different range of photos. I performed the same test on my new MacBook pro (M4) 15.3 Sequoia and got the same bug.




It always seems to be the same identical MD5 hash ===>> 3ccbfb1c186cf9b14d4248a6b5912c11 while the photos have different images




The folder that I am testing in has 620 photos.


I have submitted a bug report, however, the text field did not allow enough space... I guess that's a bug too :)

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.3

Posted on Apr 17, 2025 11:19 AM

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Posted on Apr 17, 2025 2:31 PM

Those are metadata files. Note the "._" prefix. You are using a foreign filesystem like MS-DOS or something. It can't support macOS metadata so it writes an hidden file with the metadata. But the metadata is likely identical for many of the files.

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Bug report using Find command in Terminal with md5 getting duplicate md5 hash tags for completely different photos

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