Dupe guide

Apple Photos Duplicates album — what it catches and what it misses

The Photos app Duplicates album is handy, but it has real limits. Here's what it finds, what it doesn't, and how to fill the gaps.

4 min read

The Duplicates album in Photos.app (macOS Ventura and later) is a great free feature, but a lot of people assume it finds every duplicate photo on their Mac. It doesn’t. It only looks inside the currently-open Photos library, and even there it has blind spots.

What the Duplicates album does well

Inside your Photos library, the Duplicates album under Utilities in the sidebar catches:

To use it:

  1. Open Photos.
  2. In the sidebar under “Utilities,” click “Duplicates.” If you don’t see it, your library has no duplicates Photos can detect, or you’re on an older macOS.
  3. Review each pair or group. Photos shows resolution, file size, and date.
  4. Click “Merge X items” — Photos keeps the highest-quality version and combines metadata like keywords and album membership.

What it misses

The Duplicates album won’t find:

In other words, the Duplicates album solves the problem inside the library it knows about. Everywhere else on your Mac, you’re on your own.

How Dupe fills the gap

Dupe is the inverse: it doesn’t look inside the Photos.app database at all (that would be unsafe), but it scans every other folder you point it at and finds byte-identical files anywhere on disk.

  1. Install Dupe and open it.
  2. Click “Add Folder” and add Pictures, Desktop, Downloads, Documents, and any external drives where photos might live.
  3. Click “Scan.” Dupe hashes every JPEG, HEIC, PNG, RAW, and video file using SHA-256.
  4. Review duplicate groups — Dupe shows full paths so you know which folder each copy came from.
  5. Move loose duplicates to the Trash.

A good workflow is to use both: clean the Photos library with the built-in Duplicates album, then run Dupe across the rest of your Mac to catch the photos that never made it into Photos in the first place.

Safety notes for Dupe: byte-identical only (an edited version won’t match its original), Trash-only deletion, and the Photos.app system database is excluded automatically.

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