So, I've imported about 20,000 or so photos from my Photo folders in Finder, and because of file name changing I did in iPhoto, or in Finder, I ended up with what looks like thousands of duplicates. I'm wondering if anyone here has suggestions for the most efficient and fastest method to cull these dups from my library? I'm so new to A3 that I'd hate to find out later that I could've done this job faster and more efficiently. I'm totally dreading it. I fear I'm not going to be able to make this painless. I've never used Light Table, but I'm wondering if that might be an option for comparing images?
TIA! Debbie
Hi Debbie
I’d start by going to ‘Photos’ (ie view all) and sorting by date and time. You know you can zoom in and out with the slider thingy bottom right to make the thumbs bigger or smaller?
If there’s a risk that the duplicates aren’t true duplicates - eg a high-res and a low-res version of the same image, you can press T to get the metadata to pop up when you hold the mouse over an image.
You’re still going to have to move through them pressing 9 (reject) for the duplicates though unless anyone else has any better ideas.
Persevere, it will be worth it. But don’t do too many at a time, it ill drive you dotty and cross-eyed!
d.
Light table definitely isn’t the answer :)
d.
David, this was great advice because I’m so used to using the Projects view or working in the Library Inspector area that I don’t think to go into Photos view, and I also forgot that just because I renamed the file doesn’t mean I can’t find dups by the date. Duh! ;)
One thing I discovered last night is a ton of my dups were the Flickr or Facebook sync images. I also saw that those Flickr images are lower res than the images I imported from Finder. Maybe the Flickr images are just thumbnails and not imported? Not sure how that works? Anyway, I decided in order to make the job a little easier I should un-sync from Flickr and Facebook for now, which eliminated over 8000 photos. Hopefully that will help a little, but my library is 55,000 images so I obviously severely underestimated it’s size in my first post. Way too many of those are dups too. I’ve got my work cut out for me. ;)
I’m not sure how reject works? I know how to reject the photo with the keyboard shortcut, but why wouldn’t I just choose to delete immediately? And do I use a smart search or album to aggregate all of these rejects together to delete all at once?
Oh, and I guess I need to learn more about Light Table. I have no idea what it’s for. :)
Thanks!!
~Debbie
Debbie
I had the Facebook / Flickr problem too and did the same as you. It’s a pity because it’s nice as you learn more about Aperture to improve the master and the web version to improve, sigh.
Reject is just another rating like 1-5 stars; but most Aperture views exclude rejected images by default. Why use it?
- it’s another level of safety net
- it’s one keystroke ‘9’ instead of two - Cmd-Delete
and yes you can look at them all in a smart album; I think Aperture comes with a ready-configured one called ‘Rejected’ in ‘Library Albums’; I go there and periodically delete them all. yes that only moves them to Aperture Trash which in turn when emptied moves them to Trash.
When you come to delete them from the Rejected album you may get a message suggesting that the masters are used elsewhere - in a slideshow, album or book perhaps. I used to find this frustrating, but have convinced myself that it is right at least 99% of the time so take the warning seriously. Joseph explained it in more detail in a post not so long back.
I don’t think many people use light table; it’s for making up layouts, seeing what goes well together in a page layout I’m told. If like me you show images singly not a lot of use.
cheers
d.
d.