My wife and I turned on our shared library, but of course, both of our personal libraries were littered with the same pictures we sent to each other in the years before this feature. The ability to delete duplicate photos was necessary for Apple to properly implement iCloud Shared Photo Library (a feature I fully recommend looking into for families and close friends). Plus, it needs to figure out if you’ve made edits to a copy of a photo, and determine which one you might want to keep. In the case of exact copies, Photos will merge the files in case some have superior metadata, creating a single version with the highest quality and maximum metadata.Duplicate detection can’t just compare superficial data like file size or resolution - it needs to check if you have both a full-quality and a lower-quality copy of the same image. As you scroll through the list of duplicates, for each group you will be required to give the okay for Photos to get rid of the extras. On the family Photos library - with years of sharing photos and merging libraries - there were thousands of duplicates.Ħ.

In this case (my writing machine) there were very few duplicates. When Photos has completed the search, you’re rewarded with a populated Duplicates folder. The point is you need to be patient and trust that something is happening in the background.ĥ. On the Mac mini housing our family digital photo library, the first duplicates showed up after a few hours but it was the better part of a day before the process seemed to have wrapped up. On my writing machine, that took half a day. Eventually, when going back to that Duplicates folder it was populated.

Mac photos duplicate