I recently had a huge batch of old family photos digitized, and after importing everything into the Photos app on my Mac, I realized there are a lot of duplicates—some even appear two or three times.
The tricky part is that Photos isn’t flagging them in the “Duplicates” album, probably because the files aren’t exact matches (maybe scanned separately or slightly different). I’m not very tech-savvy, so going through thousands of photos manually isn’t really an option.
Is there an easy way to identify and remove these kinds of duplicate or very similar images without spending hours sorting through everything?
This usually happens with scanned photos—since each scan can be slightly different (resolution, color, metadata), the Photos app won’t recognize them as exact duplicates. One thing you can try inside Photos is sorting by date and viewing in batches. Duplicates or near-duplicates often end up next to each other, especially if they were imported at the same time. It’s still a bit manual, but much faster than going through everything randomly.
If your photos are synced with iCloud, the Photos app may eventually identify duplicates—including similar (not exactly identical) images—on its own, so it’s worth giving it some time to process.
I ran into something similar with scanned albums—tons of near-duplicates that Photos didn’t catch. What helped was using a duplicate cleaner that looks at image content instead of just file data. I ended up using iBoysoft Cleaner on my Mac, and it grouped similar photos together so I could quickly compare and delete extras. Still requires a quick review, but it saves a huge amount of time compared to doing it all manually.