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Known Participant
September 30, 2021
Question

How to de dup and remove imported thumbnails?

  • September 30, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 288 views

Hi I have imported about 250,000 images from my old iPhoto, Aperture and even Lightroom libraries. Very pleasant surprise how simple this is to do. It looks like I am getting three versions of every image, my guess being one original (full size file), one thumbnail (tiny file) and not sure about the third, maybe also a thumbnail. By no means all pics have this feature. 

What's a good way or ways to delete all these small images ? Quite happy to start over with generating thumbnails. 

If I had to guess I reckon it's 20 years of pics at 5,000 a year = 100,000 so 60% are surplus which approximately matches my guess that 2 of 3 are thumbnails. 

I can't say my experience of deplicating apps is good, they usually need careful attention to all duplicates found and with thes emany that's not practical. However, idnetificatiuon by file size might work is my hope.

In fact why I night call "actual duplicates" I don't mind, so that is where both files are full size and the image is the same. It's the "thumbnails" I want to get rid of by the tens of thousands.

 

My first post here so I hope it is in order, many thanks for any help.   

Lightroom Classic. Macos Big Sur - all latest updates.

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3 replies

john beardsworth
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 30, 2021

Start with methods such as the smart collection and just looking at folders, patterns of filenames etc. Common sense stuff, and they will help you learning Lightroom's organisational features.

But there are a few duplicate detector plugins available:

http://www.bungenstock.de/teekesselchen/

https://www.lightroom-plugins.com/DupesIndex.php

Use these, but then use your eyeballs before deleting duplicates. And make a backup of everything, just in case you make a mistake.

Inspiring
September 30, 2021

You can use Smart Collections to "filter" by multiple criteria, including size.  Plenty of resources on the Internet that will give you more detailed how-to's, but the super simple version is to go to the Library module and click the following...

 

Then fill out the criteria you're looking for...

A collection of images that meet those criteria will be created which will give you a "filtered" view that you can then go and decide what you want to do with.

sevenhAuthor
Known Participant
September 30, 2021

apologies for the typos, it looks like there is no deit facility. That should be edit facility.

sevenhAuthor
Known Participant
September 30, 2021

looks like I need to enable in metadata display of the file size in mb - trying to find where to do that IPTC or EXIF?

sevenhAuthor
Known Participant
September 30, 2021

OK SO TO SET the Metadata to EXIF and IPTC , beside the word Metadata click the dropdown that says "Default" (if never changed) and from the many options choose EXIF and IPTC. Then magically the file size in megabytes appears in the metadata list.

 

Can I select files using this? Remains to be seen.