iPhoto was developed by Apple for Mac as a photo management app. Although it has been discontinued and replaced by Photos (also known as Apple Photos) since 2015, there are still Google searches like “iPhoto remove duplicates 2022” and “iPhoto remove duplicates 2021”. Some people are still looking for a way or the best duplicate photo finder to delete duplicate photos in iPhoto.
This article will show you how to find duplicate photos in iPhoto quickly and mass remove them easily.
Below are important facts to know about iPhoto. They can help you better understand the process of finding and deleting the duplicate photos in it.
You can quickly find and remove iPhoto duplicates with Cisdem Duplicate Finder, the best duplicate photo finder for Mac.
1. Quit the Photos app on your Mac if it’s open.
2. Press and hold the Option key and open Photos.
3. In the Choose Library dialog that appears, select your iPhoto library and then click Choose Library. If you don’t see the iPhoto library, click Other Library to manually add it.
4. Click Get Started and wait for Photos to finish preparing the library.
5. Open Finder and go to the Pictures folder. There you will find a new Photos library, and the content in your iPhoto library has been migrated to it. Note: From now on, please consider this new library your iPhoto library.
6. Download and install Cisdem Duplicate Finder. Open it.
7. Drag your iPhoto library (the new one) into it. Click Scan.
8. Once the scan is done, the scan results window will display all the iPhoto duplicate photos that have been found for you to sort, preview and view.
9. Cisdem Duplicate Finder has automatically selected duplicates for you to mass delete with one click. Or, you can choose a desired selection rule or select by hand.
10. Click Delete in the bottom right corner to remove all the selected duplicates at once.
11. Confirm the deletion.
Now the unwanted iPhoto duplicate photos are deleted and moved to the Recently Deleted album in the Photos app. To permanently eliminate them right away, go to Recently Deleted and click Delete All.
Note: If your Mac is running macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier, then the last step (step 11) will be different. Please read the user guide for details.
This iPhoto duplicate remover works based on the mechanism of iPhoto and Photos. It identifies and deletes duplicates from within Photos, just like a human would do, which ensures utmost safety. Compared to the manual method, it can provide high accuracy, speed and efficiency.
If there aren’t many photos in your iPhoto library, you can get rid of them by hand.
iPhoto duplicate photos when importing to protect your digital photo collection. Go to File > Preferences > Advanced, and you can find the Importing option Copy items to the iPhoto Library. It is also available in Photos. The option is enabled by default.
If this option is enabled, when you drag photos from somewhere on your Mac, say, the desktop, into iPhoto, iPhoto will copy the photos into the library. In other words, it duplicates them. Now you actually have two copies of each imported photo.
To prevent iPhoto from duplicating photos, you can unselect the checkbox before Copy items to the iPhoto Library. However, it is NOT recommended. If you set iPhoto not to store a copy of the photo it imports and you accidentally delete the original copy, when you try to view the photo in iPhoto, a message will pop up telling you that it can’t find the file.
This article talks about two methods on how to delete iPhoto duplicates in a safe, easy manner. Both of them allow you to remove duplicates by moving them to the Recently Deleted album. This way, you can easily restore them if needed. Duplicate photos can occur during importing photos, merging libraries, etc. Regardless of the cause, you can free up room on Mac by removing duplicate photos including iPhoto duplicates on a regular basis.
Connie has been writing for Mac productivity and utility apps since 2009. Each review and solution is based on her practical tests, she is aways energetic and trustworthy in this field.
Frank Manzke
I love this duplicate photo scan app. I’ve been using it to scan my iPhoto. I find it scans much quicker than other apps I used before. And super easy to use :)
Roger Elliott
This method worked and worked well. Thanks for sharing.
victor
is this finder not able to working on photo library on external drive? i can't select the photo library folder which i have stored on an external drive.
Rosa Reyes
Hi, victor, we apologize for any inconvenience to you. And this finder is able to find and remove duplicates from photo library folder on external drives. If you can't click "Add" button to select the folder, just drag and drop the folder to the app. This can solve your problem.
Sagar
Hats off to wheeovr wrote this up and posted it.