Seeing Double: How to Manage Your Duplicate Photos
You are not alone if you struggle to manage your ever-increasing photo collection. Dealing with those pesky duplicate photos is not only time consuming, but deleting them can be a risky business, too. We want to share with you the common causes of the unwanted double-ups, how to safely remove them and what you can do to prevent them in the future.
Why do I have duplicate photos in my photo library?
Duplicate photos are created primarily due to either consolidating photos from multiple devices (and family members) that contain the same photos, or downloading the same photo from emails, Facebook, WhatsApp. Duplication can also occur due to software corruption or importing photos from old backups.
How can I quickly and easily locate and delete duplicate photos?
Manually deleting your duplicate pictures one by one from your devices requires a lot of patience and willpower. You also need to be very careful that you don’t delete the wrong photo. For example, two photos may look like identical images but in actual fact, one may only be a thumbnail image (very small) and the other is the original full size image. If you delete the wrong one in a haste, you are at risk of losing the high quality version. Fortunately there is software in the market to help identify and safely remove duplicate photos. We like PhotoSweeper which is a fast, precise and super-efficient tool to eliminate similar or duplicate photos, even in huge photo libraries. It also detects and deletes small sized images. It can be tricky to get to grips with and so Tekkie Help provides training workshops on how to use it. If you prefer to avoid the hassle of cleaning up your photo library yourself, Tekkie Help provide a service whereby they consolidate all your photos from your devices and remove all the duplicate photos and leave you with a consolidated Digital Photo Hub, free from annoying duplicates.
How can I prevent duplicate photos in the future?
To prevent duplicate photos in the future, try not to import the same photo again – to do this we recommend manually importing photos from devices and taking the time each month to scan for and delete identical images.
Tekkie Help also runs a workshop “Identifying and Removing Duplicate Photos” – at the moment this is just for Mac users. The workshop is availble both in-person and online. The workshop is a hand-on interactive 2-hour session and we will teach you how to identify and safely remove duplicate photos.