iPhoto Cleanup Options

ByMike Moffit

How do you clean up your iPhoto library duplicates easily?

In the service area, we are often asked to consolidate User accounts and entire machines onto a single drive when computers fail or customers purchase new units. One of the big pitfalls of this action—consolidation—is the duplication of a significant number of files in an iPhoto library or on the machine as a whole.

I’ve alternately used three applications in the past to resolve this issue: Tidy Up, Duplicate Annihilator and PhotoSweeper ($9.99 in the Mac App Store, but well worth it).

Tidy Up is not specifically designed to remove duplicates from an iPhoto Library, but can be used for that task. It scans the entire hard drive, distinct directories and/or databases. It is a hefty program—the download was a 12MB .zip file. After opening the decompressing the resulting .dmg, the application was 17MB in size. The interface was elegant, in my estimation, and easy to navigate through. The choices presented from the start were entire drive scans or directory scan; more specifically, a look at your iPhoto library. For testing purposes, I chose to have it scan my iPhoto Library. The application was processor intensive. It scanned my library, finding 128 duplicates in just over 9 minutes (with over 80,000 files scanned, and not just images). The applications did have my fan running on high as Activity Monitor registered it using 117% of my CPU (Core 2 Duo 2GHz MacBook).

PhotoSweeper was just as effective, but used far less processing power, barely registering that it was active in Activity Monitor as I scanned a few directories in my iPhoto Library. The .dmg file was 14MB and the application itself took up 15.4MB. You could manually drag and drop directories of image files into it or use the Media Browser function. I methodically searched directories in my iPhoto Library after opening up the iPhoto Library by using ‘Show Package Contents.’ When complete, after about an hour of playing around, Photo Sweeper found over 100 duplicates in my iPhoto library. (I did not delete any files with each application as I wanted to see what they’d find for comparison sake.) There is a PhotoSweeper Lite version for $4.99, which allows a limited number of scans at a time. In addition, you can try the demo here.

Duplicate Annihilator was the smallest of the three applications I looked at. It took up 2.4MB of HD space when downloaded. I did not purchase this app, but tested the demo first. In demo mode, the app was limited to scan of 500 images (out of 7456). The application found a few duplicate images (in the first 500) and took a little over 10 minutes to scan that amount. It ran usage a modest amount of CPU, spiking upwards of 80% on occasion. I would have to say that my testing, in light of the restrictions, was inconclusive. It may be worth a try for the full version.

What do you use to remove duplicate files from your iPhoto library?

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