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Jeena22389650a1ho
Known Participant
February 9, 2024
Question

LR not recognizing thousands of duplicates during import.

  • February 9, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 354 views

I'm trying to consolidate thousands of images from a variety of places, and unfortunately, its a mess. There are surely duplicate images in various folders that number into the thousands of files. Much too many to do manually. To make matters worse, some of these identical files have different file names. Basically what happened is images got dropped into various folders over the years and somehow, someway, the OS was allowed to copy over all images, even suspected dupes. So what macOS did was add a "1" to the end of those filenames. So I'm now trying to consolidate all of these images into one catalog, and part of this process involves importing them to LR. Unfortunately, even though the files are identical, something as simple as them having different filenames is enough for LR to treat them as an entirely new file. I'm surprised that in 2024 LR is not more intelligent in this regard. I am wondering if anyone has any suggestions for me, because doing this manually is going to take hundreds of hours...

 

Thank you!

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    2 replies

    Rob_Cullen
    Community Expert
    Rob_CullenCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 10, 2024

    If you have imported ALL files into the one LrC Catalog, then the Teekesselchen Plugin can be used to find duplicates within the catalog.

    DUPLICATE FINDER Teekesselchen: Home

    Duplicate Photos (Lightroom Queen)

    You can have it search for files by specific attributes. For example you can uncheck 'Filenane' from the search and just look for Camera and Capture Date.

    'Duplicates' that conform to your options can appear in a "Duplicates" collection where you can view them there and choose any that you want to delete. But you have to choose the files to delete (Don't delete them all!). Teekesselchen won't delete them for you automatically.

     

    When viewing the 'Duplicates' Collection -try different sort methods (eg Capture Time)

    Use the [X] flag to mark unwanted images. Then in Library View you can view only Rejected photos,select all, and [Delete all from Disk] by [Backspace].

     

     

    Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.3, Photoshop 27.5, ACR 18.3, Lightroom 9.3, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.3 .
    JohanElzenga
    Community Expert
    JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 9, 2024

    There are quite a few apps that specialize in detecting duplicate images. I do not have experience with any of them so I can't make a recommendation, but using one of these apps before you import the images into Lightroom sounds like the logical thing to do to me.

     

    -- Johan W. Elzenga
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