The “Duplicates” section under Utilities either doesn’t appear at all or only shows a handful of photos, even though I know there are way more copies in the library. I’ve already tried restarting the Mac, leaving Photos open for days, and waiting for indexing to finish, but nothing really changed.
A lot of the time Photos only catches exact matches, so edited images, screenshots, scans, or photos with different metadata won’t show up there even if they look identical to you. That’s why people often end up with way more duplicates than the app actually reports.
Try keeping the Photos app open overnight while your Mac is plugged in and connected to Wi-Fi. The duplicate detection process can take a surprisingly long time on large libraries, especially after imports or system updates.
I had the same issue where Photos only detected a tiny fraction of the duplicates in my library. What helped was scanning the actual photo library folders with iBoysoft Cleaner instead of relying only on the Photos app.
The process was pretty straightforward:
- Open the app and choose the duplicate cleanup feature.
- Select your Pictures folder or the locations where your photo libraries are stored.
- Run the scan and let it group duplicate images together automatically.
- Review the results and remove the extra copies in batches.
It was much faster than trying to wait for Photos to detect everything on its own, especially with larger libraries.