My family recently started using iCloud Photos, and now I’m trying to consolidate several old iPhoto libraries that were saved from different Macs over the years.
The problem is that most of those libraries probably contain many of the same photos and videos, along with a smaller number of unique files mixed in. I’d like to combine everything into one library without ending up with thousands of duplicates after importing.
Is there a good way to compare old photo libraries before importing, or some method/software that can help bring in only the photos and videos that aren’t already in the current library?
Be careful doing large imports directly into your main iCloud library. Once duplicates sync across devices, cleaning them up becomes much harder. A safer approach is to test with one older library first and see how many duplicates actually appear before importing everything at once.
You might want to temporarily import one old library into a separate Photos library first. That makes it easier to compare counts, dates, and albums before merging it into your main iCloud setup.
I had a similar situation after collecting photo libraries from multiple old Macs. Before importing everything into iCloud, I used iBoysoft Cleaner to scan the libraries and filter out duplicate photos and videos first. It was a lot easier to clean things up beforehand rather than trying to sort duplicates after they had already synced into the main Photos library.