PowerPhotos > Help > Find Duplicates seems to be missing some duplicate photos

Find Duplicates seems to be missing some duplicate photos

If you ran the Find Duplicates command and removed all the duplicate photos that PowerPhotos was able to find, but are still seeing other photos in your library that appear to be duplicates, there are a couple things you can try.

The first option is to try different duplicate comparison options to see if a different setup can catch some duplicates that your first search did not. Most of the options are enabled by default, but two specific ones you might try enabling are:

  1. Allow filename variations. When trying to match photos by their filename and date, sometimes one copy of a photo will have been renamed slightly, e.g. from “IMG_1234.JPG” to “IMG_1234 (2).JPG”, or other such variations. Enabling this option can sometimes catch duplicates that the default settings do not. However, having this option enabled can possible result in some false positives in certain cases, so it is recommended that you visually review the duplicates that PowerPhotos finds before proceeding to eliminate the nonkeepers.
  2. Compare original photo. By default, if a photos has been edited, PowerPhotos will analyze the edited version of the photo when comparing to other photos in the library. In cases where one copy of a photo has been edited and another has not, you may want those photo pairs to be treated as duplicates even though the two photos are technically different. Choosing this option will ignore any edits made to your photos and compare the underlying originals instead.

There can also be some cases where there are two photos that look the same visually to the human eye, but can be very difficult for a computer to automatically recognize as being duplicates, e.g. if one copy has been resized or altered in some way. The filename + date search can help find these sometimes, but if either one of those things has also been changed, then there’s no easy way left for PowerPhotos to tell that the two photos “look” the same.

If none of the comparison options are finding these photos, then feel free to contact our technical support and send an example of a pair of photos that look to be duplicates but aren’t being found by PowerPhotos.

The best way to send the actual photo file is to select the photo in PowerPhotos, control-click on it, and select “Show Original File” (or if that item is disabled, select “Show File”). That will select the file in a Finder window, so you can then send it as an attachment. Just do that for each photo you want to send, and we can take a look at them and try to troubleshoot the problem.

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