Eliminating Duplicates in Elements 14

larrym76045931  wrote I have a ton of duplicates in my catalog.   How do I find them and eliminate them?  This has become a big enough problem to make me consider using another photo handling software.

Warning:

If you don't find what you are doing wrong to get so many duplicates, any other photo handling software won't help. The solutions depend on whether you import  mainly from camera or if you are doing a lot of scanning. Please describe your needs for more suggestions.

What to do now:

The tool offered in the organizer (see the link by arshla jindal) can find duplicates based on visual similarity. Works well with small libraries, not really realistic for a whole catalog with a lot of duplicates.

For the organizer, duplicates are not files with the same name. Those may be totally different images taken years apart. Real duplicates are files imported or scanned several times. For photos from camera, the two main criteria are 'date_taken' and file size in kB. That does not work with scans (different scanning dates and same size in TIF...)

If you don't want to clean up everything now, you can decide to delete batches of visual duplicates when you detect them. If your sort order is chronological, you can see duplicates side by side easily. The files properties on the right panel will show you which 'import batch' may have been done twice or more. This helps to solve the problem for the identified import batch. You can delete, or probably better, stack the duplicates (use the visual search above for pictures around the date_taken). Progressively your catalog will be cleaner.

If you want a more radical approach, you can use an external duplicate finder. Beware of free ones which may come with malware... Some are smart enough to let you delete duplicates. Beware that deleted files will appear as 'missing' or 'disconnected' in the catalog. Always check in the organizer, select all missing files and from the resulting dialog, select all found items and delete them 'from catalog'.

Please see Delete Duplicate Photos from Elements Organizer  .