Duplicate Photo Stacks

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Ernie+131  wrote My intention was to find and delete all duplicated photos in Photoshop 13. I clicked (in Organizer) 'Find; went to 'Duplicate Files'. After some considerable time stacks appeared on screen. I would like to know if all photos in each stack are duplicates and should I delete them all assuming that the original photo would not be lost i.e. the original photo is not in the stacks.

A general consideration when dealing with duplicates, not only with the organizer.

You probably know that there are dedicated free or affordable softwares to search for and to manage duplicates. However there is no automatic way to delete duplicates. We'll see why later, so those softwares, like the organizer, offer a way to group together (to stack) files which are considered 'duplicates'. You are left with the duty to examine the items in the stack to decide which is the good one and which to delete.

With the organizer, the stacking already offers a huge advantage. It does make your visual browsing faster and easier, it makes searching much more efficient. The keywords of any duplicate can be found, you are seeing only one thumbnail.

The wrong idea behind 'deleting' duplicates is to save disk space, which is really marginal and does not matter much. It's also to feel better with a 'clean' organization... which depends on your style of life.

The really important idea with searching and stacking is to prevent future duplicates by understanding WHY you are creating duplicates. Generally, duplicates don't come individually, they come by batches of imported files, whether it's from card reader, from exports in various formats, from the same family photo gathered by different sources.

A very annoying case is importing several times from your card reader. If you know that, you can prevent that to happen.

Also, duplicates can be simple copies or can be various renderings of the same image. Suspected duplicates may have different sizes, file formats, dates, keywords, captions or ratings... Keep in mind that what the organizer will stack are visual duplicates, not simply with the same file name.