Amazon Photos is a cloud storage service to store photos and videos. Amazon users who don’t have an Amazon Prime membership can get 5 GB of free storage. Amazon Prime users can get unlimited photo storage. Both types of users can benefit from removing Amazon Photos duplicates.
Deleting duplicates in Amazon Photos can help free up storage space and enhance the photo viewing experience. In this article, you will find a method to eliminate duplicate photos and duplicate videos in Amazon Photos in bulk. Note that this method may or may not work for you. And you can read on to find out.
It’s common to have duplicates in your Amazon Photos account. They may be generated due to certain sync settings. Duplicates could also occur when you upload photos to Amazon Photos.
Will Amazon Photos upload duplicates? No and yes. Amazon Photos is available as an app for web browsers, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and Fire devices. Let’s take the web version for example and take a close look at the question.
This cloud storage service can help avoid duplicate files by preventing users from uploading the same photos that already exist. On https://www.amazon.com/photos, suppose image “A.jpg” is already in your Amazon Photos account. If you try to upload the same file again, it will be detected and skipped. But you won’t get a duplicate warning. However, the detection fails occasionally, which can result in duplicates.
If you upload two exact duplicate photos (likely with different names) from your device to Amazon Photos, both photos will be successfully uploaded despite being duplicates.
When it comes to the duplicates that are already in your account, Amazon Photos doesn’t provide a feature or solution to quickly identify and eliminate them in one go. But don’t worry. The following method may help.
This method automatically finds the duplicate photos and videos in Amazon Photos and allows you to effectively delete all unwanted duplicates with one click. It helped me successfully removed my Amazon Photos duplicates which were generated during upload.
Here’s how the method works. Sync your Amazon Photos to your computer with the official Amazon Photos desktop app, use duplicate photo finder software to find and delete the duplicates in the local Amazon folder, and then the deletion of duplicates will be automatically synced to Amazon Photos, making your account duplicate-free.
The instructions will be broken into two parts.
1. Go to the Amazon Photos website. There, click the Download for Desktop button.
2. Install the app on your computer. Open it.
3. Sign in to the service. Enter OTP if asked.
4. Click the dropdown arrow icon next to your name. Select Preferences.
5. Choose Sync tab. Turn on Enable sync. Click Yes to continue.
6. Now you are in the Sync your folders interface.
Choose the folder(s) to sync. Make sure that the box next to Pictures is checked.
Select a Local sync folder if need. Let’s stick with the default one.
7. Click Start sync.
You can access the Amazon Photos app from the top menu bar (Mac) or the taskbar (Windows). From there, you will find the sync status.
If your account has gigabytes of files, it could take a long time to sync Amazon Photos to computer.
Once the sync is complete, go to Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (Windows), find the Amazon Drive folder, and you should find all your Amazon Photos photos and videos in the Web subfolder. Note that Amazon Photos desktop app is used for both Amazon Photos and Amazon Drive. So the folder is called Amazon Drive.
Now, make a change to the Web subfolder, such as deleting a photo in it. And the Amazon Photos app should automatically detect and sync the change. Go to the https://www.amazon.com/photos page and see if the deletion is successfully synced. You can wait for some time and reload the page to see the synced change.
Note: If all of your Amazon Photos files can be synced to your computer and the local change can also be synced to Amazon Photos, then this method should work for you, and you can continue with Part 2. If not, it won’t work.
If you believe this method will work for you, then you can check out this part.
The Amazon duplicate photo cleaner software I use is Cisdem Duplicate Finder. It’s a powerful, easy-to-use app to identify and eliminate duplicate photos, videos, audios, documents, archives and any other duplicate files. It can help you automatically find the true duplicates in Amazon Photos by content.
The software is available for both Mac and Windows. In the instructions below, I will use a Mac computer. And the instructions are basically the same for Windows PC.
1. Download Cisdem Duplicate Finder and install it.
2. Click the plus icon +, select the Web subfolder in Amazon Drive > Pictures and click Open. Click the Scan button.
3. When the scan is finished, you can view and preview the duplicate images and videos in Amazon Photos.
4. Duplicate files are already automatically selected for one-click removal.
If not satisfied with auto-selection, mass highlight all under the All tab with Command-A and choose a desired selection rule.
5. Make sure all unwanted duplicate files are selected. Click Delete to remove duplicates in Amazon Photos all at once.
6. Click Yes.
Amazon Photos desktop app will automatically detect and sync the removal to the cloud. Once the sync is done, your Amazon Photos should be duplicate-free! If you check the Amazon Photos on your iPhone or Android phone, you will find that duplicate photos and videos are gone.
By following the instructions above, you can easily rid your Amazon Photos account of exact duplicate photos, i.e. photos that are exactly identical regardless of filename.
You may also have similar photos in your account. For example, there are two visually identical photos. They look the same to you, but they are different in quality, size or format etc. Technically, they are not duplicates. I call them similar photos (or near duplicate photos). In addition, there can be visually similar photos.
If there are similar photos in your Amazon Photos account, Cisdem Duplicate Finder can help you find them and group them together for you to deal with. You may keep the best shots and remove the unnecessary ones. Check out this guide to find out how.
Above is the automatic way of deleting duplicate items in Amazon Photos. It’s also possible to manually identify and eliminate them. The manual method can be useful if there aren’t many files (and potentially many duplicates) in your account.
1. Visit Amazon Photos web app online. Login to your account.
2. Select Your Photos in the sidebar. Thumbnails of your Amazon Photos items will be displayed on the right.
3. It's recommended to choose the second thumbnail browsing mode.
4. Choose a desired option to sort thumbnails.
5. Browse through your items to locate duplicates.
6. Hover your mouse over the thumbnail of an unwanted duplicate photo or video.
7. Select the tick symbol that appears to select an item. Likewise, you can select multiple items.
8. Choose More > Move to trash.
9. Read the message and click Delete.
You can store both photos and videos in Amazon Photos. If you only want to go through photos to find duplicates and ignore video files, in the sidebar, go to Filters > Media types and select Photos.
Once the duplicate items in Amazon Photos are moved to Trash, Trash will automatically and permanently them after 30 days. During this period, it's extremely easy to restore them to your account. If you want to get rid of them immediately, select all items in Trash and click Permanently Delete.
If you are a Prime Member, you can use Amazon Photos’ image-recognition feature to group photos of the same people or places or things together. This will help you identify duplicates more easily.
You don’t need duplicates, triplicates and even more versions of the same photos or videos in your Amazon Photos account. To make photo browsing more efficient and enjoyable, it’s a good idea to remove Amazon Photos duplicates. The duplicate file finder used in this tutorial uses smart algorithms to automatically recognize duplicate items in seconds and group them together for one-click elimination. It can also help you delete all kinds of duplicate files from internal or external storage.
Rosa has worked in Mac software industry for more than eight years. She believes that the purpose of software is to make life better and work more productively. In addition to writing, Rosa is also an avid runner.
Christine Poppenhusen
I tried, some duplicates in my account had different names, but this tool found them quickly. Super helpful for me!
Gregg
Thank you. It worked! I had a lot of duplicates in my account. And it's just not a good idea to go through all my photos to look for duplicates. I tried your method, and the duplicates were gone.