Apple Finding duplicates between Lightroom and Photos (Mac)

[theoldsmithy]

Hi folks, at some point in the next few months I will be handing back my MacBook to my employers. I'm trying to get all my photos backed up efficiently for transferring to my new personal MacBook. Apparently I have 200gb+ in my "Pictures" folder. Now 70gb of that is in Photos, which is where I store stuff I really want to keep (and the family can access via iCloud). Now the majority of those will have been exported from Lightroom. I know, I know, I should have deleted them from LR when I exported to Photos! Is there any tool which could find me the files (by filename - they could be JPG, RAW or TIFF) in the Pictures folders which are also in the Photos library? Then I could remove anything which is in both places and probably save myself about 50gb of storage. That matters with a 512gb disk!

 

[kyteflyer]

No good news on that front. There are ways of checking for dupes within photos, and I suppose within lightroom, but none are particularly effective, and you usually end up still having to choose which one to keep and which to dump, but the dupe checker doesnt give enough information or allow fullsize view so you can make a sensible decision.

Here's my suggestion. If you don't already have an external drive, get one, and export *all* your photos to there. when your new macbook arrives, you can import all of those to photos. I know, you dont want all of them in there. The nice thing about Photos is that it wont import anything already there, so once you have imported a few, the duplicates will not be imported. I had to do this recently with photos I had already exported to an ext drive, because my Macbook decided that it was not going to function properly after the last Sierra (not HS, not touching that) update. I had to start over with a clean install and have now remained on El Capitan. Anyway... my rambling is heading to... 14k photos are now down to just over 7k. The dupes show up as "already imported" or similar. Make sure you export originals when you do it. I forgot that once, way back, and ended up with jpgs for many which ought to have been RAWs.

OR, you can compare one by one. OUCH.