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Removing duplicates

novanut

novanut

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 24, 2021
97
20
Not sure if this is the correct forum for this. Please move to the right one if not.

I have a bunch of music on my mini. gigabytes worth. Much of it, over the years, has been duplicated, some of it many times. I'd like to remove the duplicates that are eating up disk space. Same goes for duplicate photos, videos, etc.

Is there an app that hunts for those duplicates and allows for them to be deleted without wiping out the whole thing?

Thanks.
 
maybe not the quickest way, but for the music and photos, you can use the built in apple apps.

Go into settings and tell it to copy all new files when adding to the library. to do that of course you need enough space.

drag and drop the whole hard drive, or all the folders which might have them in it, onto apple music. then file,library, show duplicates. sort by title and just command select the 2nd (and 3rd etc...) copies of everything. right click and delete.

then delete all music outside of the library.

same with Apple Photos app basically.
 
As above there are a number of apps that will locate and remove duplicate files. My preference is the $$ professional Axis merge.

The gotcha is that if these are in a library, such as Photos by reference, if you remove the files then the pointers in the library become corrupted.

Dougs' Applescripts For iTunes has a lot of file handllng scripts, though don't see a find duplicate one.

dougscripts.com

Doug's AppleScripts - Managing Files

Download over 500 AppleScripts for use with Apple's Media Apps, plus get tips and information on writing your own AppleScripts. -
dougscripts.com dougscripts.com
 
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I have a sort of same question.
I transferred all cloud services from one drive, Google drive and a bunch of others to Apple iCloud Drive or what it’s called nowadays.
I have all the stuff online and not downloaded locally hence the storage.
Is there any way to at least check duplicates amongst approx ~100K numbers of files?
 
Duplicate detective 2 is easy to use - you can see what you are deleting. Gemini is faster, but less transparent. Both work.
 
Dockland said:
Of my duplicates? That’s what I want to address
Click to expand...

Of your files before you start to remove duplicates, in case something goes horribly wrong. Once the cleanup is complete if you don't want to risk losing the files.
 
HDFan said:
Of your files before you start to remove duplicates, in case something goes horribly wrong. Once the cleanup is complete if you don't want to risk losing the files.
Click to expand...
I’m well covered but thank you anyway.

In order to do this, hence the topic of this thread, how do I remove duplicates that at online only (in iCloud). I can’t seem to find any tool for that.
For files/folders locally or on on various attached drives, no problem.
Even free alternatives works just fine for that, but for cloud only?
 
Thanks everyone.

All your suggestions and information has given me the incentive to "git-r-done"...

God Bless.
 
If all the music is in your Apple Music/iTunes library it has its own built-in detection (N.B. @Dockland). Otherwise...


apps.apple.com

‎Duplicate File Finder Remover

‎Get more free disk space by removing unnecessary duplicate files and folders from your Mac. Remove duplicate photos on any mounted disk or folder. Use Duplicate File Finder FREE to find and remove duplicate files and similar media. Get the Pro version to delete duplicate folders, manage similar...
apps.apple.com
 
madeirabhoy said:
maybe not the quickest way, but for the music and photos, you can use the built in apple apps.

Go into settings and tell it to copy all new files when adding to the library. to do that of course you need enough space.

drag and drop the whole hard drive, or all the folders which might have them in it, onto apple music. then file,library, show duplicates. sort by title and just command select the 2nd (and 3rd etc...) copies of everything. right click and delete.

then delete all music outside of the library.

same with Apple Photos app basically.
Click to expand...
@novanut
FYI Photos now has a built in tool to find and remove duplicates. no need to redo anything with the library.
 
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Do you know whether the drive is using HFS/HFS+ [Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or APFS?
 
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