My Photos library on macOS Monterey has started getting pretty cluttered, and I’ve noticed a lot of duplicate pictures showing up over time.
Before I spend hours going through everything manually, I wanted to ask if there’s an easier way to find and remove duplicates in the Photos app on Mac. Does Monterey have any built-in option for this, or is manual cleanup basically the only choice?
Monterey doesn’t include the built-in “Duplicates” feature that Apple added in later versions of macOS, so Photos won’t automatically group duplicates for you there. That’s why a lot of people end up managing them manually or using another method.
If your library isn’t huge, sorting photos by date imported can help a lot. Duplicates usually end up close together, especially after bulk imports from phones or external drives.
Since Monterey doesn’t have native duplicate detection in Photos, I ended up using iBoysoft Cleaner to speed things up.
What I did was:
- Install and open the app on my Mac.
- Choose the duplicate scanning option.
- Select the Photos Library or folders where my images were stored.
- Let it scan and group duplicate photos automatically.
- Review the matches and remove the extra copies in batches.
It saved a lot of time compared to checking thousands of photos manually, especially for older libraries that had been imported multiple times.