There are times when I feel like giving up on iPhoto. It’s not that iPhoto is a problem. It’s all those photos, events, and albums.
iPhoto requires ongoing maintenance of the manual kind. Events have to be organized. Photos have to be organized into albums. Duplicates or similar photos have to be found and discarded. There must be an easier way. Is there? Yes.
Sweeping Out The Dupes
Apple tries to automate the events features, but I still have way more loose events than I like. Albums are easy to create and organize, but it’s a manual effort.
About the only type of automation I can apply to the many tens of thousands of photos I have stuffed into iPhoto is duplicates.
Who doesn’t have duplicates or similar photos in iPhoto?
It’s the nature of digital photography to keep taking photos until your finger is tired or your subjects have moved away to avoid you, right?
PhotoSweeper is a very useful Mac app that quickly eliminates duplicate photos, or even photos which look similar (probably more of the latter than the former).
How PhotoSweeper works is nothing short of remarkable, such that Apple should have a similar feature built-in to iPhoto.
If you’re like me or most photographers, we shoot far more photos than we need. That means many near duplicates which PhotoSweeper can find and delete.
It works in iPhoto, Apple’s Aperture, and even on Adobe’s Lightroom photo libraries (or any photos stored on your Mac).
PhotoSweeper has six different methods to find dupes or similar photos and doesn’t care about size or image format. Just drag and drop and the app checks each photo, lets you review the results, and marked photos can be sent to the Trash.
Photos can be bulk renamed and moved or copied. Thumbnails of duplicates or similar photos are displayed within seconds, and a click displays histogram and photo metadata details.
Any caveats?
You’ll do a little work with the first implementation of PhotoSweeper because that’s when you’ll find the most duplicates. After that, use PhotoSweeper from time to time to catch and discard duplicates.
