1. How To Check For Duplicates In Excel
2. How To Check For Duplicate Photos On Mac
3. How To Find Duplicate Pictures In Photos On Mac
4. How To Check For Duplicates
5. How To Check For Duplicates In Photos App Mac Mac

Go through these duplicates manually and put a check mark in the boxes of the photos you want to delete the duplicates of. Unselected photos will have a green border, and selected photos will have a red border. The NEW app for Mac to help you quickly discover your best photos, get rid of duplicates & similar images & save disk space. Choose the album that has the duplicate pictures in it. Then double click one of the pictures that is a duplicate. Duplicate pictures should be displayed on your screen. I'm still working on how to delee the one you don't want. It has to do with the x on the bottom.

Just came across this, seems as Photos created a duplicate of the iPhoto database instead of just using that one.

Now I'm stuck here with two 50+ GB libraries, eating up space on my HDD.I think iPhoto uses the Photos database, so would it be safe to delete the iPhoto database?

I'm still going to use iPhoto (because it's easier than Photos).

7 Answers

I'd say stick to the iPhoto Library if that's the app you're going to continue using for now.

When you eventually swap to Photos, do the import again.

The Photos Library is greyed out if you attempt to open it from iPhoto. Any changes you make to the iPhoto Library will not be reflected in the Photos Library, meaning you'll gradually go out of sync until such time as iPhoto no longer works (OS X 10.11, who knows?) & you'll need to reimport at that time.

Photos Library Storage Space
The Photos Library is actually just a collection of hard links to the actual data on the disk & therefore is not taking up anything like the amount of space that Finder is reporting.

More on hard links from Ars Technica:

A hard link is simply a reference to some data on disk. Think of a file as a combination of a name and a pointer to some data. Deleting a file really means deleting the name portion of that duo. When there are no more names pointing to a particular piece of data disk, then that disk space can be reused.'

How To Check For Duplicates In Excel

This means that so long as one of the pointers to the data still exists, the data is still in use. Only by deleting both will the data actually be deleted.

Ref: Apple KB - Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries

As @Tetsujin pointed out, you don't have two libraries taking 50GB of space: when you import iPhoto's library to Photos, it creates something called hard links to your photos. From Jason Snell at Six Colors (emphasis mine):

Mac users are probably more familiar with the concept of soft links, also known as “symbolic links.” Mac users would recognize the idea of a soft link from the long-time Mac concept of aliases. In both of these cases, there’s something that looks like a file or folder/directory that’s actually just a reference to the real version of that file somewhere else in the filesystem.

Hard links aren’t like that. The best way to think of a hard link is that the contents of a file appear to exist in more than one location. If a file has two hard links, and you delete one, the file isn’t deleted—because it’s still linked to from another location.

That’s what the iPhoto import inside Photos does: It creates hard links to the contents of your iPhoto library inside the Photos library. If you delete your iPhoto library, the files that were hard-linked from the Photos library still exist in the Photos library and aren’t deleted. For Mac users used to the a-file-is-a-file approach of the Finder, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

How To Check For Duplicate Photos On Mac

Since iPhoto's library gets frozen when you import it into Photos (i.e. further changes don't get synced), you can safely delete it: you won't have neither more nor less space then before.

EDIT: You can also check out this answer: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/180313/10159

I already deleted my iPhoto libraries and everything looks OK. As already reported, there is no disk space gains doing that but I like to keep everything clean.Still not so comfortable with Photos but it has potential to improve.

The easiest way to test this is to back up one of the library files onto an external drive, then delete it off the main drive. Then look at whether your disk usage went down or not. In my case, I like Photos, and am done with iPhoto. However, if hard links are used, I am worried the new Photos library will break when the old iPhoto library is deleted. I had 2 30GB libraries.

So, I tried it. Deleting the old iPhoto library did not save me 30GB. It did save me about 4GB. So the disk space reported is not accurate, even if you're using Omni DiskSweeper to measure it. But nothing bad happened. All my photos are intact in the new Photos software.

For me it did use twice the disk space (had 12GB free before the import and less than 2 right after, also Disk Inventory X confirmed that). Deleting iPhoto library returned the free space.

absolutely takes up double the space. My get info shows this. I called Apple and they said 'ignore get info'. Well, I can't ignore that my hard drive has less space on it!!!! This is so frustrating.

It looks double space to me too. I'd be careful to delete anything before i absolutely sure if it is not double space, or, which library is the real one or a linked one.

How To Find Duplicate Pictures In Photos On Mac

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When you have a really huge photo library on your Mac, it is possible that you have a lot of duplicates of those photos on your machine. Duplicates are often created by various applications to ensure that you do not end-up damaging the original photo while modifying it on your machine. They are also created when importing photo libraries to a photo viewing application. If you think your Mac has duplicate photos and they occupy a huge chunk of memory space that can otherwise be used to store other things, you have a way to find those duplicates and wipe them off your machine.

There is an app called Photos Duplicate Cleaner for Mac that lets you find duplicate photos and delete them from your Mac. The app is available for free in the Mac App Store.

Here’s how you can use it on your Mac:

Finding and Deleting Duplicate Photos on a Mac

Download and install the Photos Duplicate Cleaner app from the Mac App Store on your Mac.

Launch the app from the Launchpad on your Mac.

When the app launches, click on “Photos Duplicate Cleaner” followed by “Preferences…” It should take you to the preferences panel.

Once in the preferences panel, select “/Volumes” and then click on “-” as shown below. What it will do is remove the other drives that exist on your Mac from the ignorance list. That way all the drives on your Mac will be searched for duplicate photos instead of the main drive.

When that is done, close the panel.

Click on the button that says “Select Folder and Scan Duplicates Now” on the main screen of the app. That is where the searching for duplicates begins.

You will be prompted to select a folder where you want to run the scan. Just select the folder where you have stored your photos and that you think contains duplicates. Then, click on “Open” to open that folder in the app.

As soon as you click Open in the above step, the app should begin finding duplicates. Once it is done, you will be shown how many duplicates it found and how much memory space you can free up if you delete them. Click the “OK” button to move forward.

In order to prevent accidental deletion of your important photos, what you can do is unselect all the photos that have been marked as duplicates by the app. That way you will be able to individually select the photos that you wish to be removed from your machine.

To unselect the photos, click on the Menu icon and select “Unselect All.”

If you want to free up some memory space really quickly, you can sort the photos by their size so that the largest one will appear at the top, and you can get your work started there. You can then move down to the smallest one, but deleting it will not provide you with much memory space.

To do that, click on the Menu icon and select “Sort items by Size” followed by “Descending.” It will put all the photos in the descending order on the app screen.

You can now select the duplicate photos that you want to delete. Check all that you want to delete, and then click on “Clean Duplicates.” It should clean the duplicates for you.

How To Check For Duplicates

Conclusion

How To Check For Duplicates In Photos App Mac Mac

Nobody wants their precious memory space to be used for duplicate photos that are not of any use. The guide above walks you through the steps on how you can find such photos and delete them from your machine to reclaim that valuable memory space for storing your other files.