Easily Clean up Duplicates in iPhoto to Simplify Sharing

By Ben Gross
in

As Apple iPhoto has added functionality to easily share photos first with email and now with Facebook, Flickr, and MobileMe, I have found it increasingly useful. The program generally does a great job of managing large collections of data without you needing to worry how it manages the underlying data. However, if something goes wrong, it can take a bit of work to find out how to look under the hood to try to fix it. Duplicate photos are one such problem as they take up disk space and make for additional work when trying to select which photos use when creating album to share.

A few years ago, I cleaned out hundreds of duplicates from my iPhoto library that were the result of a few imports that went bad because of a faulty USB cable. I used a set of command line tools (find, md5, grep, uniq) to help me make the comparisons. The process was frustrating, time intensive, and generally unpleasant. The problem is complicated by the fact that expects photos to be in a set of folders under its control and builds an index over those files, so if you make changes, you may need to rebuild your iPhoto library. I highly recommend you avoid this path.

Recently, I felt like it was a good time to clean up my library again so I did a bit of searching and came across Duplicate Annihilator from Brattoo Propaganda Software. The license was inexpensive, about $8, so I bought it. I tried it on my own collection the other week and the process went surprisingly well.

Duplicate Annihilator has a few methods to figure out duplicates and a new “magic” will pick the best method for you automatically. Typically the program uses a MD5 hash to checksum the files as the default. You can of course do this yourself for free as I did in the past, but where I spent hours painfully comparing sets of number before, I spent maybe 15 minutes this time around. I did not want blindly trust the program so I manually compared the results and all photos listed as duplicates clearly had multiple versions.

The application nicely tags all of your duplicates in iPhoto comments, which makes both searching for and deleting the duplicates straightforward and painless. Duplicate Annihilator uses iPhoto itself for file management and tagging so no mucking with the file system or the iPhoto library files is necessary. I recently recommended it to several friends who experienced similar results. I recommend trying out Duplicate Annihilator if you want to clean up a messy iPhoto library.

Published August 30, 2009