Today’s post is about a go-round I had with getting rid of iPhoto duplicates. The tale is a good illustration of the problems people can get into and how my particular situation had a happy ending.
In iPhoto, the version with iLife ’09, there is a menu choice called ‘Duplicate’. Stay away from it if you value your sanity. Of course it would come in handy if you needed to copy several pictures but such was not the case here.
I’ve been plagued by duplicate pictures for several years now and have made several desultory attempts at clearing them out. In the end, the endless proliferation of dupes defeats my good intentions and I give up having exhausted my patience with scrolling, selecting and trashing them.
While working the other day I somehow selected all my photos and chose the dreaded ‘Duplicate’ button. I may have been thinking it was a ‘Find Duplicates’ selection, like was available in iTunes at one point. In any event, the end result was a cascading nightmare of duplicate photos.
What to do? My iPhoto library had roughly doubled from over 5,000 to more than 10,000 photos. It was inelegant, a waste of disk space and just darn frustrating, dang it.
So, whip out the third lobe of my brain, aka Google search, and look for software. Search terms: iPhoto duplicate remove. Presto and I come up with several items. The main contender being a gem called Duplicate Annilator from Brattoo Propaganda Software, an auspicious name if I ever heard one.
Duplicate Annihilator promised to fix my iPhoto up in a jiffy, delete those duplicates and have me cruising in my photos presto! Oh boy, whip out my credit card and minutes later I was $7.95 lighter in the bank account.
While there are several options for getting rid of duplicates, I used the default, which was to name the duplicates the pleasingly original name of ‘duplicate’ in the comments of each duplicate photo. Then you do a find for ‘duplicate’ and there they all are, ready to be trashed.
It took me a couple of false starts. I’m new to this version of iPhoto and didn’t quite trust that the duplicates were the correct ones and not original unique photos. I moved stuff into the trash, outta the trash, back in the trash, then finally did the big delete.
Game over, right? Not so fast. My Mac Mini, while a super machine isn’t a speed demon. iPhoto spent the night few minutes patiently ‘moving’ the photos into the trash, but strangely I began seeing the photos stacking up in one corner of the desktop. Yikes!
OS 9 aficionados will kindly recall the Finder limitation on the number of files in any one directory. Any more and the grinding wheel of system lockup would end all processing. I was afraid I had hit the same thing. The Finder had locked up, the rainbow wheel was spinning away and no hope on the horizon. Why were the freaking files on the desktop and not in the trash. I ran an alternative Finder replacement called Pathfinder and could see them there, and also via the Terminal.
Finally, lockup seriously occurred and I force shut down the machine. Gloom pervades the room. I boot up, and, whoah! The files are in the trash. Bonus points for OS X. Don’t know why, don’t know how, all I know is job completed.
The only postscript is that the thumbnails of the photos with duplicates were missing in iPhoto. Just a big frame full of black. Gave me a scare as I thought, oh joy, half my pictures have been deleted. Not to worry. Launching iPhoto with the option+command keys pressed pulls up an option to rebuild thumbnails and the iPhoto database. All came clean in the wash.
Don’t try this at home, kids.
