Duplicates in iphoto from syncs gone wrong ( will this idea work to fix it?

Question

Hello all, i have recently come back from a month of traveling the US in which i took about 2,000 photos on my iphone, so when i got back home i synced my iphone up to my imac, and during the sync process i launched iphoto and began importing the 2,000 photos. Well the first sync attempt froze, so i pulled the USB out of the phone and re-synced, and that froze, so i tried again this time successfuly importing the pics into iphoto, neatly organized by time-stamped events from 10/22/09-11/20/09. Anyway after the 3rd sync, i realized that the first 2 botched attempts actually imported some of the photos on each attempt but incorrectly time-stamping them to putting them into the July 09' event for some reason (first attempt), and creating a new event incorrectly time-stamped as the day of the import (2nd attempt). Anyway what this means is i have many duplicates and triplicates of most of those 2000 photos, its a mess.
So having said that, i should note that i have never deleted any photos out of my iphone, i have every single photo i have ever taken still in my iphone camera roll, 3,700 to be axact. I have since taken the time to hand select all the photos taken from that trip in iphoto and correcty moving them into the correct time stamped event created from the 3rd succesful import. Rather than carefully guessing which photo is an original and duplicate and risking deleting photos by accident, i had an idea that i hope will work given the fact that i still have all photos still in iphone camera roll, and wanted to get feedback on this before i actually tried doing it,,,,
,,,i was thinking that if i went into iphoto and deleted all the photos and events from right before i left for the trip until now, and then re-synced my iphone to my computer, would iphoto recognize all those photos from that time needed to be re-imported from the camera roll into iphoto again, this time organizing them into their correct dated events? I have a setting for the importing of photos, something about not showing or syncing any photos that have already been imported from camera roll, so by deleting those pics from iphoto, i was thinking that it would detect those photos to not be in iphoto and want to re-import them. So i am taking this extra pre-cautionary step of asking the help forum if this would work or not before just going ahead and doing it. I do not have a digital camera so all my photos in iphoto are from my iphones cameral roll. Thanks for reading this.
Stabb

Answer 1

ok, so i tried my idea, i went into iphoto and selected all the events that were from the dates corresponding to those photos, and moved them into iphoto trash. Then i synced my phone back up to itunes, and after the sync was complete, i checked in iphoto to see if it would recognize those pics would need to be re-imported back in from my camera roll, and they weren't there in the import window. So either iphoto was not detecting those to be imported because all the photos were still in iphoto even though they were in the trash bin, or iphoto won't detect photos for importing after they've already been imported once despite them being deleted from iphoto after the import. I have an external hard drive with time machine backing my computer up every few hours and i am still a bit nervous to just empty iphoto trash with all those photos in it, so i just restored all the events back into iphoto from the trash bin. I really felt like this should have worked. Can anyone confirm if iphoto does not detect photos for importing off iphone camera more than once if they've since been deleted out of iphoto?