I’m cleaning up my photo library on macOS Ventura 13.4 and realized I have a huge number of duplicate pictures. The built-in Photos app lets me merge them, but doing it individually is taking forever.
Is there a faster way to handle duplicate photos in batches instead of manually merging every single one?
If your duplicates are already inside the Photos app, try leaving your Mac plugged in and connected to iCloud for a while. Ventura sometimes takes time to finish indexing before more duplicates appear in the Duplicates album. Once it catches up, you can merge larger groups much faster.
Before deleting or merging in bulk, make sure you have a backup of your photo library. Some edited versions or Live Photos can look identical at first glance but still contain different data.
If the built-in duplicate detection is too slow or misses a lot of photos, you can also try using iBoysoft Cleaner to scan the folders where your images are stored.
What worked for me was:
- Install and launch the app.
- Open the duplicate scan feature from the sidebar.
- Add the folders (or external drives) where your photos are stored.
- Start the scan and wait for it to group matching images together.
- Review the results and remove the extra copies in batches instead of handling them one at a time.
It compares files using the actual image data rather than just filenames, so it can still detect duplicates even when the names are different or have things like “copy” added to them.