Photos Duplicates Merge deletes larger version

[poocat]

Hi folks, weird one here. I have a ton of older photos with duplicates. They seem mostly to be related to Photo Stream, which I guess I used a long time ago.

The larger photo is tagged Photo Stream. It's usually roughly double the size. When I merge, Photos keeps the smaller one. Any idea why or what's going on? See screenshots for before/after and info on both phots pre-merge and the remaining one after. I actually am not sure what photo the original size should be for these, hence posting the file size in screen shots with camera info.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[fatTribble]

I notice that the resolutions are the same.

Folks who know more please correct me, but I wonder if the extra size of the larger photo was not adding anything to the quality? 🤔

 

[poocat]

That's exactly what I was wondering, but I'm not sure how to tell, or why that would be the case. I did some research on the file size of the camera (iPhone 6), and people say it varies from 1.5 - 2.5 mb per photo, at normal max resolution, and 4-5 mb per photo for HDR. Not sure if that's accurate but it would seem to indicate no additional value in the larger file size, and they might be due to some up/download oddity with Photo Stream?

 

[poocat]

No one else seeing this huh? Was hopeful.

 

[Makisupa Policeman]

No one else seeing this huh? Was hopeful.

Haven’t upgraded to Ventura yet but in iOS 16 so far it seems to be picking the higher quality version consistently. Sorry you’re having this issue

 

[poocat]

Haven’t upgraded to Ventura yet but in iOS 16 so far it seems to be picking the higher quality version consistently. Sorry you’re having this issue

Thanks for letting me know! I think it’s doing the correct thing and there’s an error with file sizes for some reason, but still no clarification from anyone as to whether I’m right or not. Appreciate your experience.

 

[Bodhitree]

I see they’re both jpg’s, could it be that the smaller image has a higher amount of compression without losing much detail? That would mean you’d want to save space and keep the smaller image, perhaps?

 

[poocat]

That’s exactly what I’m wondering. Is there a way you know of to compare the two other than what photos provides?

 

[Bodhitree]

Export them, open in a photo editor and visually check for compression artefacts maybe? I don’t know of any apps that would do an automated comparison. I hear that Photos actually downsamples the image to about 128x128 in order to check if its identical, it might miss compression artefacts if thats the case, but then again, it could be a first step and it actually does do a full-size comparison at some point.

 

[poocat]

Thanks! Good insight.

 

[Makisupa Policeman]

You could try some cleaner apps like PowerPhotos or PhotoSweeper (I think these are the only two i know of that are safe and won’t potentially damage your photos library) and see if they “pick” the same ones the Duplicates album is. Then you could be fairly confident the Apple algorithm is sound

 

[poocat]

This is a good idea. I’ll see what I can find and report back.