How to delete duplicate photos & other stuff

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Hopefully my username will convey the extent of my computer knowledge and you wise ones will be mercifully patient with me.

I'll start off by trying to leave out what, at this point, may be superfluous information. In a nutshell, I just got a new iMac. (It's awesome, I am in love!)

I am trying to be a big girl and learn to do things by myself, so I used Migration Assistant to move the contents of my old Mac to my new. But, partially because of who I am, I may have repeated the migration 2 - 3 times. I've been on the phone with Apple Tech support and they tell me it's no big deal.

But, now that I have the HD from my old computer on this new one, when I open the HD and click on "all images" I have this humongous file of like 10,000 images and it seems that any image I downloaded on my old computer has wound up here.

The worst part of this is that it looks like I have numerous duplicates of every photo I ever took and put into iPhoto on the old computer. Which wouldn't be so bad except that I can't seem to delete them.

Last night I spent 2 hours manually dragging many of these out and into the trash. (You can't just highlight and delete them; I tried. )I had successfully (I thought) accomplished this as the trash was keeping track of the items (I had it up to 500) and I emptied the trash and called it a night. But they must have multiplied overnight. When I went back in this morning, many of the same photos I got rid of were right back there. And sure enough, when I looked for the number of items at the bottom of the screen, it read "over 10,000" and when I went to bed last night it was down to 9,500 something.

I'm a'scared to call those nice people again at Apple Tech Support. Last time I called we got disconnected and I'm not entirely sure it was a mistake. They've tried to help me but they insist that having all this stuff doesn't hurt anything. Well, maybe it doesn't but it's annoying to see all these duplicates photos- and many of them are bad photos I don't even want. And certainly don't want 3 - 6 times.

Also, each time I go into "all images" the order changes- there might be different photos at the top. Lots of weird stuff going on.

I am sending this plea for help: how do I get rid of the stuff I don't want?-- although I fear the questions and suggestions to come may send me into depths of despair as I try and navigate them.

TIA, anyway :Confused:
 
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OMG - photos secretly reproducing inside iPhoto overnight. Disgraceful! ;D

Firstly, welcome to the Forums!

You can multi-select photos you wish to remove from iPhoto by clicking on the little film roll symbol just above each section of photos, then R-click on any one of those selected and choose Move to Trash (or go to Photos in Menu bar and do same). Yes, it's still time-consuming, but it's pretty quick.

Why you cannot delete the photos from Trash is puzzling. I take it you mean Trash in iPhoto, not the OS Trash. Clarify please.

In the process of migrating material from old -> new there may have been some file fragmentation. It's not a major problem in OS X, but you can probably help to tidy things by repairing Permissions with Onyx Titanium Software.

There is a third-party application called Duplicate Image Detector http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20188/duplicate-image-detector which may help you find those pesky reproductions and remove them

Post back on what progress you might make. Good luck!
 
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Yes, it is disgraceful... my old computer never used to display such shenanigans. That I know of. There are other weird things that go on but

Big gulp of air as I attempt to explain. I'm not in iPhoto when I see all these images. I go to the HD and the window on the left has these headings:

Devices
Places
Search For

Under "Search For" are the headings

All images
All movies
All documents

When I click on "all images" on the left and it opens this huge file (I guess it's called.) iPhoto does not become active. (In fact, as an aside, many of these images are not even in iPhoto.)

So yes, I drag each item into the regular trash. As I said, last night I dragged about 500 items in and watched the count go down, then I emptied the trash. At some point, the count just went back to the original. And I swear this morning some images I deleted were back, but in even greater numbers.

I just had a sinking feeling as I had a flash to many horror/sci fi movies I've seen where the main character is trying to describe some unbelievable event and no one's buying it and the more she describes it the more paranoid and crazy she sounds.
 
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You can't delete anything from there (search for)....
The bottom portion of your finder window:
Search For, which contains quick access to Smart Folders that will find any file on your Mac that was used Today, Yesterday, Past Week and document types like All Images, All Movies, All Documents.

You will notice that if you click on any item in any of those smart folders, at the bottom of the finder window, it will show you the path to where those items are actually store.

As far as anything that comes up with iphoto library, "don't" ever go in there to delete or modify anything, only do it from your iphoto application.
 
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Ok, so I downloaded and ran Duplicate Detector. Unsurprisingly, it came up with a lot of duplicates. But now I don't see how to do anything about them. Does anyone know if this program actually does any deleting? Once again when I highlight and click delete, I get a noise that I know means "no". There's a trash can at the top of DD but I don't see how to use it.
 
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Okay, do you know the Cmd-Delete function? In other words, once a bunch of files has been selected - and I assume here that you have selected the many images you wish to dispose of - press Cmd-Delete and they should all disappear to the OS Trash.

Otherwise, in DupDet (v 1.1.10), there is the function in Collection to move dup's to Trash. You can even label (with a colour) the duplicates found.
 
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Hey hugh,
Duplicate Detector (v 1.1.10)
Are you able to find a link, I'm having no luck?
Regards
Kane
 
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No, sorry, I've searched with Google for the older version (and there is a Mac site, whose name I cannot recall right now, which might have it) but without success.

Edit: http://mac.oldapps.com/

I wonder if it's a registration thing, ie. only if you've bought the app will you be able to send duplicates to Trash. The version I'm using is unregistered because I have little use for the app, and I cancelled its search long b4 it had listed all duplicates.
 
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I tried the latest version (just to test it out) but wasn't confident it the way it listed items that I would be deleting only duplicates and not the originals too, so I quit the app. instead going for it.
I'll try it on an external drive when I get a chance to, and see what it does and doesn't allow, and post back when I have, (may be a while though, as I have to mess around with the drive a bit to do so)... so, if anyone gets in there first, I'd be interested in the results.
 
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I tried the latest version (just to test it out) but wasn't confident it the way it listed items that I would be deleting only duplicates and not the originals too

I wondered about that too, but also wondered if it really mattered?
 
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firstly.... I don't know you, but you're not an idiot!
Secondly, yep it matters.. unless you are ok with losing all the photos that you had no intention of deleting!
:)
 
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Secondly, yep it matters.. unless you are ok with losing all the photos that you had no intention of deleting!
:)

Ok, so if my DD detected 5 duplicates and I chose to delete only 4 of them, wouldn't that be the same as keeping the original?
 
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It's important to decide on your understanding of 'duplicate'. Strictly we know what it means, but, given that, where is the original image? As said, I've only ever trialed DID - and briefly at that - to see what it does. So, if you find 5 duplicates, by definition they are not the original, but you will only prove that by trial and error. Have a flash drive handy, and put a 'spare' copy of an image on it before going through the t&e process.
 
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Very good ideas, everyone. Thank you, thank you! Will let you all know how it goes.

Maybe I'll hang around from time to time and actually learn new stuff.
 
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Duplicate Annihilator here found 1000 dupes for me and having the dupes shifted to a pre named <by you > folder means you have time to check things out before committing to trash all the dupes.
 
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Duplicate Annihilator here found 1000 dupes for me and having the dupes shifted to a pre named <by you > folder means you have time to check things out before committing to trash all the dupes.

Thanks! Do you know if this'll work outside of iPhoto, though? My problem isn't in iPhoto; most of the duplicates are elsewhere (see my earlier posts on this thread).
 
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work outside of iPhoto, though?

Sorry - no idea, as have not tried that. Altho if push comes to shove, you could always put them into iPhoto to sort dupes.
 

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