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I have duplicate images and videos stored on Google Photos. How can I detect and remove them?

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4 Answers 4

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Update

This method will no longer work. As Google itself says in this link: Upcoming changes to Google Photos & Google Drive

From 10 July 2019, Google Photos and Google Drive will no longer synchronize automatically.

You can use Google Drive to get your photos and use an other software to delete duplicates.

There are some exceptions where the photos are not deleted from google photos to protect you from accidental deletes.

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  • 4
    Using Google Drive no longer works.
    – vy32
    Commented Jun 30, 2019 at 18:51
  • Picasa has been discontinued and is no longer available.
    – Flimm
    Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 16:33
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Google Photos tries to avoid uploading duplicates, but does not always succeed when different upload methods or devices are used. For example when you uploaded using Picasa, a new upload using the Desktop uploader will create duplicates.

There is no easy way to remove duplicates, but some of the following may help:

  1. You can delete duplicates manually, for example in https://photos.google.com/ where they should be next to each other.
  2. The problem is however which one to delete:
    • one photo may be edited, the other not,
    • one photo may be in an album, the other not.
  3. When the upload dates are different (for example when you uploaded long ago via Picasa, and now again using the Desktop uploader.) it may be easier to delete the duplicates in https://photos.google.com/search/tra where they are sorted by upload date.
  4. There are more ways to get a useful search result, for example the device from which they are uploaded.
  5. See https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FAQ/google-photos-1/how-to/how-to-search-for-photos
  6. Since very recently it is possible to delete photos directly from an album. Go to "More options" (3-dots icon), and use "Move to trash"
  7. When you uploaded in the free "High Quality" and have your photos in albums, it may be wiser to simply ignore the duplicates in the library.

A feature to sort and delete duplicates of photos with Google Photos that are already backed up doesn't exist. You may have to manually select the duplicates and delete them.

Source

Other way is to use the Picasa client. Get it at https://picasa.google.com/ and install it. Then, login into your Google account. You will now see that all of your Google Photos files will show up in the client. Enable syncing and then go to Tools, choose Experimental and click on Show Duplicate Files. Delete the duplicate files and sync your library again. Now any duplicate pictures will be removed from your library.

Source

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  • Picasa has been discontinued and is no longer available.
    – Flimm
    Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 16:32
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Matt is absolutely CORRECT!

Duplicate Files in Google Photos

Google Photos can smartly detect duplicate photos and will skip uploading them if a copy has been uploaded previously. The file names of your photos can be different and they can reside in different folders of your hard disk but the service will still recognize the duplicates and remove them from the upload queue.

taken from:https://www.labnol.org/internet/google-photos-tips/28889/

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I've had the same issue and tried using Picasa's show duplicates function but it didn't work. I was able to quickly delete duplicate photos by looking at the file names of two images that were the same. I noticed that the duplicated image had -001.jpg added to the end of the file name. So I searched with a * wildcard 

*-001.jpg

That showed all the duplicate images, I selected them and removed them.

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