Why does iphoto import duplicates

Unfortunately, I did both changes within a two week period. So it may be possible that adding the iPhone was the culprit. Hey apple gurus, my issue is not the storage i use 4g externals but a proper image archival and retrieval management system. Thanks for a great learning experience with Photos — it has left me with little hair on my head. Just bring back iPhoto! In other words, it sucks as an image management system and is in NO WAY an alternative to using the finder as you suggest.

Why have duplicate copies of photos in the same physical location? Makes more sense to me to have the copies on an external drive. You have some Duplicate Files on your computer which hampers your memory space.

If you use this software you will be get comfortable. Having read the above starting at the top but not all of it I did a bit of fiddling around and the outcome may be of interest. I have been dealing with iPhoto and Photos and being a bit of an Apple novice made a few errors which then had to be sorted.

Most of the photos are. Things also went wrong so that applicable creation dates refer to when the photos were added to Photos rather than the date the picture was taken and even some camera added dates were incorrect. As a final point due to the errors I finished up with photo file names having added characters, e. I also had some file names which consisted of a number with enough digits to rival Pi!

As a test I started by using Photo Booth to take a picture which by drag and drop was put onto the Desktop. This photo was then drag and dropped to the Photos icon on the Dock — in the same way a song can be added to iTunes. It arrived in the correct place date wise when the left menu column Photos option is selected. I now had a way to add photos to Photos if that makes sense.

Working down the folders I arrived at the photos. Here goes! However having the photo on the Desktop means the filename can be changed and a drag and drop will get the new photo into Photos but I wanted the quality file size? I have the impression that accessing the original is probably not necessary as it seems a Delete will delete the original, and Export Unmodified Original will give a copy of the original so it can be altered to suit. Photos really stinks.

The title of this is misleading…. Right now importing means I have to go back and then delete the files from whatever folder like my desktop that I had them in OR I have to use referenced library which I dont want to do….. I use Duplicate Files Deleter as it is very effective.

I dislike it even more now. When Photos opened I decided to give it whirl to see if there were improvements. None that I could find. Can this be prevented from happening?? Photos app is a jail for photos! For the shake of simplicity, we are missing more and more features. Just try to drag and drop a photo from Photos to a web browser. Try to edit the picture with an external editor. It happens to me everyday now. If one single thing is going to force me to return to Windows after 3 years on OS X, it is this insane Apple madness that duplicates all my files music and pictures!!!

I am so frustrated with the new Photos, I cannot organize my albums as easily as with iPhoto. I have to keep scrolling every single category by date, and with iPhoto I was able to see all my albums all on main screen, why did they change this?

Also, when adding a photo from desktop into Photos, editing it, then dragging back onto desktop, it copies both, which is unnecessary. Maybe there is a way to enable this? So if I do this Can I delete the folder with all nmy pictures? Can I flush my original folder then? Unless you want to delete your pictures, you should not delete the folder with all of your pictures. Deleting your pictures deletes your pictures. So, in essence, through Finder you will see TWO photo libraries one from iPhoto and an exact copy that gets migrated to Photos.

Now, both libraries appear to have the same file size for example, my libraries show up at about GB each — which means that to most people, it appears that Photos duplicated the library, taking up another GB worth of space.

However, that is not the case — because the new Photos library is only a hard-link to the original, there is no additional storage being used, even though Finder shows each library at GB. This is not an article about importing photos, you can read about how to import photo libraries here:. This is an article about preventing Photos from making a duplicate of each picture that is separately used. Photos DOES copy pictures if you use it like this.

Very confused…. I payed 20 bucks for it and it was before they built obsolescence into their software and ruined it with the thumbnail system. It still works awesome. Keyboard shortcuts for all the important functions. Copy, move, rotate, crop. Drop down list with a memory of the last 20 paths you moved images to. Viewer mode, file manager mode. I can even re-save or convert to jpgs using whatever level of compression I want. Or save in other formats.

It also loads the next picture while your viewing the current one so I can go through a thousand pictures in just a few minutes. Switching to a macbook pro has been a real pain in the bass! And I suspect there is nothing that works as well as that 20 year old program for a windows platform either.

And I really do like my macbook pro. I just loose my temper over the simplest things sometimes and later regret it. The workaround is as confusing as the original problem!

If I delete a photo while in the Photos app, will it delete the original photo from the original spot?

Or will it only delete the thumbnail and then stop identifying that the photo exists? Does that make sense? If yes, awesome, if not, well crap. Followed the instructions to turn off the copying feature, but the thumbnails still take up an enormous amount of space, its almost not even worth using the app.

It is nice though to be able to view all of the photos like it allows you to. I learned from earlier comments how sensitive some of the commenters are to this crucial matter. Soooooo sorry. I also keep my photos in Folders organized hierarchically in the Finder. I gathered from this osxdaily article that the intent of NOT copying the photos on Import was to assist people who work this way. My experience is that it is no help at all:. Am I missing something here? Why does Apple not describe these particulars in the release materials?

I tried several times to import photos with the unchecked copying option. What I could see in the package content of the library, folder Resources still contained many photos with the same size as the original images. Still very confusing with this import option. Strange … the import option does not seem to have any effect, really. I tried a simple import from my iPhone and it only imported half the photos, even after several attempts of creating a new library. My Picasa managed library will remain in Picasa for the time being — sorry Apple.

Well, I wanted to import my 5Gb photo folder into Photos without duplicating them, just leave them into place. Twice as much as the real folder size. Something is really wrong with this app.

I hate itunes as well. Photos is so closed as Itunes. I did a test importation with a 37 MB folder of jpegs. I told Photos to NOT copy the images in the library. Great marketing ploy by apple. Allow people to manually handle where their pictures are stored but continue to add them to photo using more? Select Kind in the first drop-down menu and Image in the second one. Here, you will be able to easily spot duplicate images. You may also want to sort the files by Name. You can either toil away for hours on end trying to manually delete duplicate images or use trusty software to get it done in a few clicks.

MacKeeper has a Duplicates Finder feature that lets you easily search for and delete duplicate photos on your Mac. The intuitive interface makes it easy to use.

Download and install MacKeeper. Once the scan is complete, click Remove Duplicates to delete all duplicate files on your Mac, including duplicate images. If you prefer to review the files and delete them one by one, simply unclick Auto-selection. The Mac Photos app will not be able to help you find duplicate images that are already in your library, but it can automatically detect duplicates as you import them. You will have to manually search for duplicate photos already stored in the library.

Newer versions of macOS have replaced iPhoto with Photos. The older iPhoto app does not have the Smart Albums feature. As a result, you will have to manually sort through the Library folders to find similar image files.

With photos located in different folders, you face the risk of deleting the wrong file. You can avoid the mistake by following these steps:. Fortunately, the Photos app comes with a built-in duplicate detector. A Duplicate Photo warning appears every time you import an image that already exists in your Library. You can choose to import the duplicate photo, which creates a new file in the Library.

Opting not to import the duplicate will make Photos skip that image and move on to the next one. You have the option of enabling the checkbox for Apply to All Duplicates, which lets you perform a bulk action for several images at a time.

Prevent useless files from eating up valuable drive space. Whether you choose to do it manually or using software, make a habit of taking out the trash files.

And because images are particularly heavy and aplenty, they require your attention the most. With over 5 years of supporting Mac users, Ruslana lives and breathes everything Mac. Tech expert, Apple lover, and well, a cutie. Say hi on LinkedIn! Oops, something went wrong. If you're suffering all of these problems, this article could help you figure out the answers. We use iPhoto on Mac to store our precious pictures. As a photo library, it may have stored thousand of photos from multiple sources.

Such as you imported them from mobile phones or downloaded them from the internet. So, duplicate photos are a common problem on Macs. Typically duplicate photos accumulated due to a couple of reasons.

The main one is that you have an automatic import happening iCloud Photo Library, for example , and then you trigger a manual import. Just because the iPhoto on Mac cannot detect and identify the duplicated pictures, so the multiple ways to import photos can be the major reason for duplicated files accumulation on Mac.

Usually, you can prevent this problem by sticking to one importing method. The other reason that duplicates can happen is through bugs in the Photos app. Unfortunately, no software is perfect, and the iPhoto app is notorious for getting confused and having issues.

Sometimes these issues result in extra pictures going into your library. The photo library is also an application that takes up a larger percentage of Mac's total space because of the large amount of storage and a large amount of space taken up per photo or video.

To be honest, the iPhoto on Mac cannot detect duplicates automatically, and only by checking the duplicates manually can we delete those photos. It's worth mentioning that sometimes these duplicate files are visible while other times they are hidden. No matter how these photos wind up on your computer, they're eating up valuable disk space, potentially slowing down your computer, and you will need to remove them. There are two ways to remove duplicate photos on Mac.

One way is to delete photos manually, another is a more straightforward method which could save you a great amount of time. Let's take a look at each of these in more detail.