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With the recent release of version 2.1, PhotoSweeper (unlike cheaper rivals) can find duplicates within OS X Photos libraries, as well as iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom libraries, plus images that are sitting in random photos on your hard drives. PhotoSweeperĪt $10, Gwinno Software’s PhotoSweeper isn’t the cheapest of the duplicate photo removal tools out there, but in my experience, it’s the best. That way, you have the option of going back and grabbing lost images if needed, but aren’t cluttering up your main hard drive with an old photo collection that’s almost entirely duplicates.

My advice: move your old library in its entirety over to a high-quality external hard drive and keep it there until you are absolutely certain that Photos or Lightroom imported everything correctly. If you’ve already decided to switch from iPhoto or Aperture to OS X Photos or Adobe’s Lightroom 6, you could trash your old iPhoto/Aperture photo library and use Photos or Lightroom’s new library for everything going forward. The same warning applies if you’re thinking of deleting an entire previous photo library. The looser your rules are, and the less you manually manage the list of duplicates before hitting the “Delete All” button, the greater the chance you’ll accidentally delete something worthwhile. It’s tempting to dump as much as possible when you’re presented with the opportunity to reclaim gigabytes of lost space by just hitting a button, but be sure you’ve given everything a look-over, first. Each app makes certain assumptions (with your guidance) as to what should be called a “duplicate.” You can make those assumptions strict, or loosen them to catch images that are extremely similar. That’s why lost photo recovery tools are almost as popular as duplicate removers.Įxercising caution when using duplicate photo tools can be challenging. Exercise Extreme Cautionīefore going any further in this How-To, read this carefully:īe very careful (yes, that’s bold, underline, and italics all at the same time) before deleting any of your “duplicate” photos, particularly in bulk. One of these libraries may be the only record you have of precious memories, and making the choice to just dump a giant collection of images can be calamitous. The duplicate eliminating tools below turn what could be days of agonizing hunting-and-pecking into a mostly automated hour or two of deleting unneeded images. If your libraries are this big, you have a lot of potential to recover hard drive space.īut even if your photo library is smaller, there’s a very good chance that there are duplicate images inside, swelling what could be a manageable collection into something needlessly bigger.

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GrandPerspective, the free disk space mapper I recommended last week, quickly shows just how out of control the photo libraries have become: my OS X Photos and Aperture libraries are the two huge blocks on the left, consuming 1/3 of all used space on the drive. I personally like to see disk information presented visually rather than mathematically. If you do the math relative to your hard drive’s size, you’ll understand how much photo libraries are weighing down your computer: they were consuming around 1/4 of my iMac’s 1TB of drive space. A window will pop up with a number, which in my Mac’s case was over 236GB between a number of different photo libraries - Apple’s Photo Booth, Aperture, iPhoto, and Photos, just to name a few. The simplest technique is to open a Finder window and right-click the Pictures folder under Favorites, choosing Get Info. If you’re not sure just how much space your photo collection is consuming on your Mac, there are two ways to figure it out. I’ve used both apps, as well as many others, and can help you choose the one that’s best for your needs… That’s an incredible amount of wasted space attributable to duplicates, so it’s no surprise that a $1 utility called Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro has recently become the #1 paid Mac App Store app, while a superior alternative called PhotoSweeper ($10) is in the top 50. After installing OS X 10.10.3, the new Photos app converted my 90GB Aperture library into a 126GB Photos library, and left both on my hard drive. Particularly after installing OS X 10.10.3 with Apple’s new Photos app, you might be surprised to learn that you’ve lost a lot of hard drive space, and that there are suddenly tons of duplicate photos on your Mac. Today’s How-To is focused on something very specific but with a lot of optimization potential: trimming down your Mac’s photo library. I’ve focused a lot over the last few months on helping readers to speed up and optimize Apple’s Macs - everything from adding RAM to recovering hard drive space and upgrading old hard drives to faster SSDs.

Photosweeper select locked photos