Combining duplicate images

[Marswarrior462]

I want to combine duplicate photos I edited into one on my Mac. I tried using the repair tool to outpaint photos with crooked horizons, but the repair tool in Pixelmator Pro is terrible. I then duplicated my photo and used an AI image editing website (neural love) to outpaint my image for me, but all the original quality and metadata was destroyed in the process, so I ended up with my composition fixed but as a bad thumbnail. Is there any software I could use to gather all the best parts of each duplicate image and fuse them into one final photo with all the original metadata, including time, location, camera specs, and resolution preserved? The closest I can think of is the duplicate detection in the stock Photos app, but it doesn't do a very good job at detecting duplicates, particularly edited versions of photos/videos that lost the metadata of the original. A similar problem I hope to solve is combining edited videos with the original. I used Pixelmator Pro's new video editing feature to upscale several old videos to 4K, but I can't edit my own videos through the Pixelmator Pro extension through the Photos app. When I try to use extensions with videos, all the apps are greyed out, even the ones that support video editing, so I used the Pixelmator Pro app to edit my videos, but it saved them as a separate video with all the original metadata destroyed. I used the adjust time and date and the add location features of the Photos app to take care of that for me, and then I waited for them to sync to the cloud, hoping that the Duplicates feature of the Photos app would detect them and take care of them. It didn't

 

[Slartibart]

Is there any software I could use to gather all the best parts of each duplicate image and fuse them into one final photo with all the original metadata, including time, location, camera specs, and resolution preserved?

There is a difference in “outpainting” and doing the above. Minimal requirement to compose different pieces into one picture are layers, e.g. you open one image and load/paste the others or parts of them as layers, and then align,refine selections, delete, transform, blend, whatever - I am pretty sure you can do this with Pixelmator Pro.
Take a look in the PP preferences to understand the differences when you open or import your photos in it. The metadata will be preserved in your exports - to quote the Pixelmator Pro manual:

The repair tool of most photo editors/paint programs does not really offer an outpainting substitute (same is valid for the often available expand/extend-function) - of course that depends on the texture patterns in the image your are editing.
If you want to apply machine learning based outpainting I suggest to use e.g. the free Draw Things (other frontends for stable diffusion are of course available 🤓) and an appropriate model checkpoint release.

Of course there are Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Gimp, Acorn, Graphicconverter, Photoline, [any member of the friendly audience reading this can kindly insert the image editor or processor of their choice here] which will offer certain (and different to PP) implementations of the required functionality - maybe more to your taste.

But it sounds to me that you want to blend different photos or parts of them and as far as I can see Pixelmator Pro allows that.
Does it represent the best option to do this? Obviously YMMV.
Can it blend parts of different images and export the final composition including metadata? Of course it can.