Imported a folder with 30,000 images. LR Cat shows 50,000

[samc53415385]

Hi there, I'm wondering if there is an up to date solution for the problem I have created myself.

Like many people I take a lot of photographs on my phone. Some important family memories, many work related and far too many screen shots. Over a couple of years this accumulated to 130Gb worth and I decided to try and sort through the 30,000+ images.

I downloaded them all from my phone. There was a mixture of JPG, HEIC, MP4, MOV, AAE(?) and PNG. I moved the MOV, MP4 and PNG to seperate folders and began importing the remainder to a brand new Lightroom Classic Catalogue.

The process took approximately half a day, but ultimately finished. However when checking through I noticed that many, perhaps all images were duplicated! I noticed that the catalogue had 50,000 images instead of 30,000.

Is this something I have to repair manually or is it a known bug? I'd like to avoid installing 3rd party plug in software that hasn't been licensed or endorsed by Adobe.

Thanks for your help

[@MNiessenPhoto]

Hi,

It has happened to me once when reimporting some photos, albeit much fewer, and this is what worked for me:

- All duplicate photos add "-2" added as suffix to the filename, so in the Library grid, search filter by text (filename contains -2)

- Select all (Ctrl/Cmd + A)

- X to mark them as rejected.

- Remove the search filter and take a look at the pictures. Since the rejected ones appear grayed out, it's easy to roughly check if those are next to identical pictures. Some time had passed when I noticed it, so I wanted to make sure I hadn't removed the deleted some of the original files (i.e. without -2). If that happens, just select the rejected photo and Ctrl/Cmd + Up arrow to remove the reject flag. It will take some time for you to review them, with so many images, though.

- Ctrl/Cmd + Backspace to delete all rejected photos from Lightroom and disk.

Hope that helps,

Michael