I had you leave the Name field in place earlier above where you set up the Any criteria.
#HOW TO SORT THROUGH DUPLICATE PHOTOS MAC DOWNLOAD#
I’ve found that a lot of apps embed or download HTML-based help files, so many tiny images can be associated with them. You can probably shave down which images you want by excluding very small ones. On my Mac, this search produces 171,499 images, and dragging and dropping that many images can cause the system to rainbow-spin for a long time or even lock up. You can create a smart folder that grabs all images indexed by Spotlight.
- Drag the selection to the new destination.
- In the results window, click and then press Command-A or choose File > Select All.
- Set up the destination to which you want to copy all images, like a folder or hard drive.
- You can click the Action (gear) menu and choose Show Search Criteria to display them.) (When you click Save after naming, the criteria disappear and the Smart Folder icon and name appear the top of the window. Name it something like “Find all images by type”.
- Click the Save button in the upper right so you can recall these criteria if something goes wrong.
- Repeat step 6 for GIF and PNG (and BMP, if you think you have any of that format, primarily used in Windows).
- Click the + at the end of that line, and create a field with Kind, Image, and TIFF.
- Under Any, change the pop-up buttons to Kind, Image, and JPEG.
- Any is the right selection, so you can leave that alone.
- The ellipsis button creates an Any of the Following Are True entry, which is what you need to have multiple criteria for images in a single search.
-
#HOW TO SORT THROUGH DUPLICATE PHOTOS MAC PLUS#
Now hold down the Option key, and the plus button in the upper right next to the entry that was created (which starts “Name” and “matches”) changes to an ellipsis (…).In the upper-right corner, click the plus (+) button.
Press Command-Option-spacebar to create a Finder Spotlight search window.You have to go through a little rigamarole to get the fields you need: The simplest way to do this with Spotlight is via a Finder-based search, for which you can create a Smart Folder to repeat it later without losing the window settings. This leaves the originals in their spread-out locations, but that may be simpler to clear out once you know you have them all captured. I can’t figure out a good way to consolidate access to all images without copying them into a single location. You can use either macOS Spotlight or a third-party tool to find all images by file type and then copy them. You might think you just want to do the former, but it’s very likely you’ll have two or more copies of many images if your images are scattered about drives and multiple computers. It’s certainly two different questions and tasks: finding and consolidating photos, and then making sure you don’t have multiple copies of the same images. How can I possibly find ALL the photos I have regardless of where they’re stored, then move or copy them into one central location for editing, storage, and backup? He already owns PhotoSweeper, an app that handles de-duplication, but he’s frustrated at having to select all the folders that contain photos in order to perform a scan and then sort through the results. I’m finding that there are photos EVERYWHERE on these two machines-Photos library, iPhoto library, Photo Booth library, multiple file folders on dozens of different levels and in countless locations.
Steve Thomas is trying to clean things up across two Macs: