As much as Apple steals cool app ideas from Mac app developers, there are more times when Apple just lets the chips fall.
Take iPhoto. What’s the one thing all of us iPhoto users have in common? Duplicate photos.
Apple could easily build-in a simple search mechanism that would check the date of each photo, check the size, even scan the image itself, and tell us which ones are dupes (vs. the originals we want to keep).
What would be the fun in that? We wouldn’t look for solutions ourselves. Apple, acting as benevolent dictator, would solve all our problems.
But when it comes to finding duplicate photos in iPhoto, you’ll need an app for that. Thus Apple helps us to fend for ourselves in time of need (which builds character), and helps to stimulate the third party app development industry.
Duplifinder is the simple, elegant, useful, and inexpensive Mac app that does basically one thing. It finds duplicate photos in iPhoto, and gives you options to keep or obliterate (depending on your mood at the moment).
It’s simple. Launch Duplifinder and it scans all the photos in iPhoto.
Duplifinder lets you zoom in on the photos so you can determine which to keep and which to discard. Select which ones you want to delete.
Then, click the Move All Duplicates To iPhoto Trash and the dupes are gone, but not forgotten.
Not forgotten? Yep. As a simple security measure, Duplifinder merely moves the duplicate photos to iPhoto’s trash, so they’re out of sight, out of mind, but not completely forgotten.
Fear not, because Duplifinder only finds duplicates. If you have photos that are similar, cropped, enhanced, or modified in any way, those don’t get selected for destruction.
Simple, quick, elegant, useful, mostly cheap, and a good way to reclaim a little of your Mac’s storage after shooting 713 photos of your child’s kindergarten graduation ceremony.
bregalad says
All the dupes in my iPhoto library are intentional. iPhoto only lets you keep two versions of a photo: original and modified. Often the original has red-eye or some other flaw that I’ve taken time to edit out. Going back to that when I want a different size/shape crop is a complete waste of time, but that’s what iPhoto makes me do. So in the case of a photo that I might want to gift as a 5×7 or 8×10 I make the initial edits and then duplicate the photo. Any crops are applied to the duplicate. If I want a different, larger crop in the future I’ve got a carefully edited copy I can duplicate again instead of starting from scratch. Of course it’s not always so easy to plan ahead so some photos that have been printed at multiple sizes have had the same edits applied multiple times, but each time I’ve kept the edited one so I can always re-print in the future without additional effort. Hard drive space is cheap (although not as cheap as before the Thai floods).
Duplicates could be avoided, but Apple would have to keep a list of changes (maybe not even possible with external editing tools) inside the iPhoto database. That way each photo would only need appear once and every edit ever made could be undone/re-done simply by rolling through the history of the file a la Time Machine.
Pecos Bill says
I get plenty of duplicate photos in iPhoto the old fashioned way. Importing photos from the same SD card or camera. What I would really like to have is an app that displays all the photos that look alike– not just duplicates. That way I could easily get rid of the lower quality photos and keep the good ones.