I have about 100,000 photos and videos sync'd to iCloud, originals on my Desktop Mac, optimized copies on my laptop Mac, iPad and iPhone. I cleaned up duplicates on my Mac, there were 100 or so. It now shows no duplicates. On my iPad I see bout 1000 duplicates. I'd prefer to clean up on the Mac, why are the two lists not the same? Can I sync them somehow?
-Drew
Mac Studio (2022)
Finding duplicates is hard. Pictures can be similar enough that the algorithm misses that they're different. This is a pair of picture my Mac Photos keeps coming up with
but they're clearly not, an I want to keep them both!
My guess (only a guess) is that the algorithm used by the phone and iPad must be quite different from the one used for the Mac because of the energy required to run them. People use their phones constantly for energy intensive processes, and they are very sensitive to their phone's battery life. The Duplicate finder runs in the background, when you're not using Photos, and, if it were as efficient as the Mac's version, it might suck the life out of the phone much faster. Probably phones and iPads do most of this business at night when they're plugged in, but then, I'm just guessing.
How are the extra duplicates that the iPad found? Are they things you should look at on your Mac?
Interestingly enough, I checked the duplicates on my m2 MacBook Pro, and there are 1600. I wish the UI was better.... move, click, carriage return, move, click, carriage return... Still better than tap tap on the iPad
-Drew
You can select (shift-click or command-click) several and merge them all at once. But, because of "similars" you must be very careful. The deleted files go in Recently Deleted, so you can change your mind....
I was under the impression that would merge multiple sets of duplicated into 1. I want to merge each set individually.
To be a little more clear: If there are two rows which say merge 2 items, and I select the 4 photos in the 2 rows, and merge, I will end up with 1 photo when I want 2.
Andrew Lynch wrote:
I was under the impression that would merge multiple sets of duplicated into 1. I want to merge each set individually.
To be a little more clear: If there are two rows which say merge 2 items, and I select the 4 photos in the 2 rows, and merge, I will end up with 1 photo when I want 2.
Only the rows merge. In your example, you would end up with 2 images-- the better of each row. And sometimes there are three images in a row, and you end up with the best of the 3.
Of course, this is the sort of thing you could try, yourself, and see what what happens. Again, deleted pictures go in Recently Deleted, so you'd have nothing to lose. But it's fun to try things...
Yes, I would like to seem them on the Mac as well. Most of them are time lapses which are, in absolute terms, different, but the difference is uninteresting.
Why does find duplicates have different results on my ipad vs my mac?
