How to delete duplicate photos in Lightroom Classic
duplicate photos in Lightroom - Yep, it happens - this guide shows you how to delete duplicate Photos in Lightroom Classic safely.
Background
I recently supported (through an online 1-2-1 using Zoom) a client sort out his Lightroom Library and images and removing duplicate photos in Lightroom. It was a familiar scenario that I have encountered on many occasions with clients. Photos stored in different places; local hard drive, external hard drives, some in Apple Photos, some in Lightroom CC because they installed that instead of Lightroom Classic and so on. Therefore they found Lightroom duplicate photos across their library
The client phoned me to ask if I could help them sort it all out and get everything in one place, Lightroom Classic and organise the images into some hieratical structure. Having done that migration umpteen times, I was confident I could assist them. So after a few hours of configuring, and downloading photos from LR CC and Apple Photos we began the import of all the images and, at the same time re-organised them inside of Lightroom Classic into year and date order.
As ever this produced multiple copies of the same photo “duplicates” and in this case, there were triplicates and even quadruples! This often occurs because the file names of the photos or file formats are different. i.e jpg or jpeg and so on or previous botched attempts to rescue a failed hard drive or images renamed the files to a string of letters and numbers.
Best Practice - how to avoid duplicate photos in Lightroom
I’ve said this many times before but will say it again, never change the actual file name that the camera assigns to the file. If you do you run the risk of Lightroom and other software treating it as a different image to another version of it. Lightroom provides a field (image Title) separate from the image file name for you to call your image something more interesting than IMG_25478.jpg
Remember, that Lightroom and other software can’t actually scan the image graphically to identify if it as a duplicate so it relies on the file name, date and time stamp and metadata (exposure, lens, camera etc). More of this later.
Try to stick to one application for your photos, trying to use Apple Photos, iCloud, Lightroom X and Y all as repositories will almost certainly create headaches down the line at some point. All of these applications expect to be the master source so trying to combine multiple applications is not impossible but it takes a lot of discipline and a very tight workflow and unless you are tech-savvy and really understand how to manage this, it’s best avoided.
Solving the problem of Duplicate Photos in Lightroom and removing them safely
After the initial import and reorganisation of my clients 25,000 photos, it was apparent very quickly that there were multiple copies of the same images in different resolutions, different file formats and so on. So how to remove duplicate photos in Lightroom safely without going through a long and laborious exercise of manually checking every duplicate occurrence?
After some research, to save them that painstaking task, I came across several plug-ins for Lightroom to automate the identification and process of removing them. Some solutions you have to pay a small fee to use (trial versions are available) but the one I finally settled on after testing two paid ones was the free one which worked a treat and was actually better at doing what it said it would do than the two fee-paying plugins I tried.
Using this plug-in meant we were able to remove 10,000 duplicates reducing the library from 25,000 to 15,000 photos and the whole process took no more than 30 mins including manually spot-checking the results.
Teekesselchen is a fast duplicate finder plug-in for Adobe Lightroom using EXIF meta-data
It works on Windows and MAC
http://www.bungenstock.de/teekesselchen/
Before you rush off to install it and remove thousands of photos I want to make a disclaimer. I’ve only used this plug-in once for one client only and therefore I assisted them in configuring the parameters, running the scan and manually spot-checking the results before, I asked them to press the DELETE Key to DELETE from Disk! Please, please, please make sure you are comfortable with the parameters you set and with deleting the duplicates. I hold no responsibility for you using the software and/or deleting images.
If you would like my assistance to help you through the configuration and process, please book a 1hr 1-2-1 online session
The developer has written a tutorial and I found a YouTube video if you want to have a go yourself. You can always install it, configure it, run it to see what it throws up without deleting any images!
Removing duplicates in Lightroom
Removing duplicates in Lightroom Criteria
Removing duplicates in Filters
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