Warning about running the Remove Duplicates wizard in ios16

[mappyuk]

I know it’s beta and I know I have only updated my iPad and iPhone but not my iMac but foolishly I ran the remove duplicates feature on my phone on the iOS 16 beta and ran into problems. It identified over 1000 duplicates and correctly showed the duplicated photos and data on each side of the screen so feeling reassured I pressed remove duplicates.

Only later when looking at my photo library on the iPad I noticed a huge number of unique photos missing. When I checked recently deleted it had deleted completely different photos which thankfully I could restore.

I know I’m an idiot for doing this in beta software but just wanted to give the heads up for anyone that might be as reckless.

 

[stocklen]

I know it’s beta and I know I have only updated my iPad and iPhone but not my iMac but foolishly I ran the remove duplicates feature on my phone on the iOS 16 beta and ran into problems. It identified over 1000 duplicates and correctly showed the duplicated photos and data on each side of the screen so feeling reassured I pressed remove duplicates.

Only later when looking at my photo library on the iPad I noticed a huge number of unique photos missing. When I checked recently deleted it had deleted completely different photos which thankfully I could restore.

I know I’m an idiot for doing this in beta software but just wanted to give the heads up for anyone that might be as reckless.

ooh, you are a foolish brave man for trying that function.

At this stage, you really need to see the beta as very early and unreliable... with most things not really running as intended. Ideally it should be running on a secondary device as im sure most people are doing... but even on a secondary device with iCloud in the mix its got the ability to make changes to your data that spans all your devices.

Personally, my advice is to not try such a potentially destructive function whilst in beta - unless you have iCloud synching switched off and the device is safely ring fenced from the rest of your data.

 

[Alias3800]

I haven't had that experience and I've spot checked a huge lot randomly selected files that were dupe-deleted.

My library was nearly at 60k, closer to 50k now… did find a ton of dupes though, so I'm confiding in it enough. It removed a bunch of "title-2.img" type of files, which existed for whatever reason.

 

[Paddle1]

I learned not to mess with photos on a beta when the Files app corrupted a folder when I tried to do a transfer. Fortunately somehow it "un-corrupted" later on.

 

[ninecows]

Just gonna bump this, because there is still reason to warn about this.

On 16.0 (not beta) and photos has found a lot of duplicates. Some of them are truly duplicate. Others are in fact just photos taken even several seconds apart but on another camera than the phone it self.

I discovered this as I had a bunch of photos taken to produce a stop motion movie and these were different although obviously not by much.

Others are of the kids. Many shots taken within a short period to capture the right moment.

So look carefully before blindly deleting

 

[fatTribble]

I deleted a few duplicates. Most were correct meaning the same picture and file name. Some were just two photos I took of the same thing. To most people that’s not a duplicate.

So definitely look carefully before hitting the Merge button