I'm Stuck – Lightroom Is Full of Duplicate Photos and It's Slowing Everything Down!

I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom to manage my photo projects for years, and usually, things go smoothly. But recently, while working on a client shoot, I ran into a huge mess. I imported images from multiple sources — my DSLR, a backup SD card, and even synced some from my cloud storage — just to make sure I had everything.

Now Lightroom is a disaster.

My catalog is full of duplicate photos — some exact copies, some with different names or slight edits. It's completely thrown off my workflow. I'm wasting hours trying to manually sort through thousands of images, unsure which ones to keep and which are just taking up space.

To make matters worse, Lightroom doesn’t even have a native feature to detect or remove duplicates. My system is lagging, storage is almost full, and I’m falling behind on deadlines. I never thought something as simple as duplicate photos could turn into such a major headache.

At this point, I just need a fast, accurate way to find and delete duplicates in Lightroom before I lose more time — or worse, accidentally delete something important.