Duplicates in my catalog

After fooling around with the folders, I hit Synchronize Folders and Lightroom added about 3,000 files to my catalog. Approximately half of them have no metadata and cannot be located (at least not immediately). The other half appeaer to be duplicates -- already in the catalog and having a second location in Windows. (I thought an orginal image could exist only once in Lightroom!) I identified those 3,000 files with a frame color so I can sort and identify them.
So, is there a way to ask the program to "find all the duplicates and delete one of each from the catalog and from Windows"? I don't want to do it one-by-one and I'm afraid of just deleting the whole batch. If I did delete te entire entrie 3,000, the number of photos in my catalog would be back to approximately where it was before I screwed it up.

Okay, I gave up and started a whole new catalog. Rather than use the feature that watched folders and automatically adds photos, I'm carefully adding them one folder at a time with the "get photos" function. I've now done almost two year's worth and now I'm starting to see the SAME problem creep in. There's a group of photos now in the middle of my collection where each one shows up twice -- once with the real file name and once with the shortened version with the ~ in the name. Can anyone help! This is driving me nuts!

Similar Messages

How to duplicate the database/catalog ?

Hi,
How can we quickly duplicate our database/catalog to create a test environment ?
Thanks,
Paul

Do you mean to copy the existing Database ( Schema) into your test environment?
You can Export and Import your schema like this:
File --> Import --> SAP HANA --> Catalog Objects
Regards,
Krishna Tangudu

Duplicates in the Catalog

Hi, I recently uploaded my pictures into Lightroom from 1 location on my hard drive but all the pictures have come with duplicates. There are no duplicates on the hard drive. In the catalog both the pictures show the same name and if I click on Show in Explorer, both files point out to the same location where the picture is saved. I have more than 100 images in the catalog. Is there any way through which I could remove all the duplicates rather than deleting each duplicate image manually.
Regards
Akhil

If it just happened as a result of one import action and it was the last time, you can go to most recent import in the catalog tab, select all and remove. As far as why it happened, not having "ignore dupes" checked on import would be the first thing to suspect, but you're saying in one import action it created more than one copy of each photo? That would be some sort of error. Are you also sure they aren't raws+jpegs? In any case, with only 100 in the catalog, doing it by hand wouldn't be hard, but you want to figure out how to avoid it from now on.

Duplicates in my catalog PSE6 Organizer

I am finding dozens and dozens of duplicates in my organizer catalog for PSE6. It's the exact same photo - same file name, date, and size. Only one appears on disk. It's odd because periodically PSE6 says it found new photos that I was quite certain were already in the catalog. I guess that's where the duplicates are coming from. Is there a way to weed them out?

Okay, I gave up and started a whole new catalog. Rather than use the feature that watched folders and automatically adds photos, I'm carefully adding them one folder at a time with the "get photos" function. I've now done almost two year's worth and now I'm starting to see the SAME problem creep in. There's a group of photos now in the middle of my collection where each one shows up twice -- once with the real file name and once with the shortened version with the ~ in the name. Can anyone help! This is driving me nuts!

Duplicates photos in Catalog

Adobe Elements 4
XP
Dell
How may I quickly find and remove duplicate photos in my catalog?
Somehow I have 100's scattered thru my catalog.

Ray
This question has been posted before and I don't remember anyone coming up with a clean way to find "duplicates".
You could select a photo and try Find Similar (by color) or something like that and hopefully the copies will pop up. The hiccup is you have to have a "starter" image to compare, you can not just say Find All Files That Are Similar.
The Find by Filename might work, but you again need a starter image. Also if one file is titled My Two Nephews and the same photo is labeled Two Boys Fishing, finding by name won't work.
The best bet would be to select one of the duplicates as you notice them and delete from catalog; you can also select delete from hard drive if you are confident you don't need the picture on your hard drive.
Organizer is not supposed to accept duplicates, but I believe it hiccups sometimes.

Duplicate photos in catalog......

Hi
I've been engaged in a project to clean-up my Photoshop Elements catalog for several months now...   so far, without success.   What spurred me to do this was getting into a situation where I had (literally) thousands of duplicate photos in my catalog -- and I had no idea how they got there....
So, since this problem started, I have
a) moved to a new PC (not b/c of this problem -- but it did give me a clean slate)
b) upgraded from Elements 7 to Elements 9 (I did that b/c I thought if somehow this was a bug maybe it would be fixed in Elements 9)
c) completely deleted Elements and all its catalogs so I was starting from a completely clean slate
d) gone back to loading photos from my camera cards in an attempt to start from scratch
So, I started by loading photos from just one of my camera cards (about 500 photos).   Everything was looking good -- the photos got loaded into Elements; I started to put them into albums; everything was going swimmingly.
Then, I took some new photos and plugged in my camera. I have the option set in "Preferences" to "Copy New Files Only". However, when Elements proceeded to do its stuff.....   instead of saying "I found 15 new photos" it proceeded to reload (as new) everything on the camera card -- i.e. all 500-odd photos.   Now, when I look in the "shot date" directories, I have duplicates of all photos -- such as, DSC_0054 and DSC_0054-1; DCS_0055 and DSC_0055-1 etc etc etc...   so now I have 1000 photos in my catalog....   and lots and lots of duplciates. Which is exactly the problem I started with :-(
I thought this had happened originally because I was doing something wrong...    but I know I did nothing at all wrong here... I've been able to track exactly what I did and I just don't think there is any reason why Elements should have reloaded as new all of the photos it had already loaded and put in the catalog.
I'm curious....   has anyone else seen this kind of behavior? Does anyone know what causes it?    Honestly, I'm just about ready to give up on Elements -- what good is it if it can't even simply detect and identify duplicate photos from the camera that it has already loaded? Isn't that kind of "digital photo 101" stuff???   I described this problem to a professional photographer friend, and she suggested that I not use Elements to offload photos from the camera but only to catalog and edit things once they are on the disk. Frankly, if that's what is needed to make this software work that seems kind of ridiculous....
In case this is of interest, I am running Windows XP and my camera is a Nikon D40.
Any help suggestions much appreciated.

Thanks for your response....   What I would really like is to prevent the problem happening in the first place.   It really seems to me
that Elements is just behaving in a buggy manner... it had already offloaded thoses 500 photos -- why did it do that again?
It's interesting.   I've since (as an experiement) added yet more photos to the camera card in question and offloaded them through Elements and this time it did only detect the new photos.   Why does it sometimes work and sometimes not?
I'd be curious to knwo if others have run into this behavior and if anyone knows of the cause?

Searching for duplicates in PSE catalog?

I am experiencing numerous duplicate photo images in my PSE catalog. I woud like to do a search of the catalog and bulk remove the duplicates. Is there a way to do this?

See that faq by John R Ellis:
http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#_Find_and_delete
That works with PSE6.
Once you have selected a number of files, you can either:
- right click, choose stack and automatically suggest photo stacks
- or the find menu, 'by visual similarity'

Duplicates,duplicates from many catalogs

A couple of years ago I started having a lot of problems a lot with PSE & its catalogs. This only got worse when I upgraded to newer versions. As a precaution against loosing data I saved all of the catalogs. Things have settled down a little with the current version I'm using PSE 11 although I can't get all of my tags for people places & events to be displayed correctly.
Yesterday I ran a duplicated file program on the drive that had all of the old catalog's & it said that I had as many as 4 copies of some pictures which are said to be identical. There are supposed to be up to 15000 duplicates. My problem now is can this be believed & should I just delete the 'duplicates' or am I risking something that I can't recover?
Do the programs that look for duplicates all use the exact same criteria so that they should all produce the same results?
I would assume that the pictures that were taken with digital cameras in more recent times would all have an EXIF data still embedded in them. Is this correct or does PSE strip this from the actual pictures & just somehow link any data to the catalog someway?
As for pictures that I had scanned I had added date taken (where known) as well a tagging them with names people & events.
The pictures were stored in a tree structure with pictures located in files labelled, country,state, event etc. Much of this appears to have been lost & I'm aware that many people recommend now that all picture just be placed in one folder is this correct?
Can 2 copies of pictures be 'identical' & still have PSE treat them differently?
Could I just delete all catalogs including the current one & then the PSE to do a search for pictures on my hard drives? What would I end up with?
Any help in this regard would be much appreciated.

Robert Jacobson has a script for removing duplicates here:
http://home.comcast.net/~teridon73/itunesscripts/
As for removing MPEG files, have you discovered the "kind" column. If you go to View>>View options, there is a check box to display it.
You could either sort on the kind field or create a smart playlist where Kind is the format you want to delete.
This will group files of the same type together, but you would have to delete them yourself.

"suspected duplicates" are ghosts, is my catalog corrupt?

Hi, when importing, some of my photos show as "suspected duplicates" although they definitely are NOT in my catalog. Is my catalog corrupt? Is there a way to correct it? Thank you

Please disregard:
It turns out that if there are multiple copies of the file in the subdirectory of the directory I am importing from that Lightroom marks them as duplicate, and rightly so. They aren't duplicate in my catalog, they are duplicate in the subdirectory when I view from the parent directory. Sorry

Want to get PSE organiser 11 to recognise duplicates at import

I have recently acquired a macbook pro with mountain lion and bought photoshop elements because I am familiar with the windows version (older). (I want to keep the photos i download in folders i can see, not embedded in iPhoto).
The first batch of photos i downloaded from my iphone with iphoto and then imported into photoshop organiser without a problem.
But for subsequent batches i tried to download directly using import>from camera or card reader, and saving in a named folder within Pictures (and in subfolders according to date). This was fine the FIRST time I did it, but now it does not recognise any photos IMPORTED THROUGH ELEMENTS ORGANISER as duplicates. So every time I download photos from the iphone it duplicates them in my folders.....that is....all EXCEPT the ones that I originally imported from iPhoto.
It correctly recognises these as duplicates and allows me to deselect them before import. But NOT so, for the ones downloaded directly using Elements organiser.
I theorised that Elements organiser is changing the metadata files when it imports and subsequently not recognising the original ones it detects on my phone as the same image. So I experimented with choosing 'none' instead of 'basic metadata' as metadata template, and experimented with checking the option to 'preserve current name in XMP' but it did not make any difference and continued to not recognise duplicates (but ONLY those imported directly from the phone bypassing iphoto) no matter which Elements Organiser options were used when the image was downloaded for the first time. (The size of the file was 1-2kb bigger when 'none' instead of 'basic metadata' was used for the original, though.)
THE MAIN REASON I BOUGHT PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS INSTEAD OF USING IPHOTO WAS SO I COULD SAVE MY IMAGES IN MY OWN FOLDER STRUCTURE.
But if I cant do this without either duplicating everything each time i import, OR having to mentally keep track of all the previously imported photos and manually select only the new ones (and run the risk of missing some), then it is unwieldy and a waste of money.
And there seem to be a lot of people with this problem on other threads and not all using macs. this seems like a very basic problem and surely should be fixed by the developers?????
LATER....
I have just discovered the SAME THING HAPPENS with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-T27. Files that are already imported are not recognised as duplicates when I take another photo and then try to import just the last photo. PSE organiser wants to import the whole card again. So far I have only tried it once with the metadata options set for "preserve current name in XMP" and "none" for metadata template (as opposed to Basic Metadata template).
I did notice in the info section for the duplicated images that the duplicates have different times. The 'Date Created' under "file properties" for each of the duplicates (.JPG, -1.JPG, -2.JPG -3.JPG) increases by what looks like the time it was added by the organiser.
Does this mean that PSE organiser is modifying the 'Date Created' info to match the time imported and then at next import it is using the modified "date Created" time to check for duplicates?? Of course they are all seen as new files if this is the case!! Can this bug be fixed if it is a bug?? (This would fit with the iphoto ones being recognised correctly as duplicates because the original files for these are still stored in iphoto and haven't been downloaded or modified when saved via PSE organiser.)
I have taken screen shots of an example that was imported 4 times using different options as above and the 'Date created' increases for all of them regardless of the options i fiddled with as mentioned above. I can email them to anyone who thinks it would help solve the issue.
I may be barking up the wrong tree with all of this, but any help or hope of a future fix would be much appreciated,
Thanks
Kerrie

I have had this problem of duplicate imports and used the following work around.
In the photo downloader, do not select any option that will in any way change the photo's name or metadata when it is imported. If there is any difference between the previous import and the file still on the camera, the downloader will not recognize them as duplicates and will import the camera file, yet again. In short, select "Do not rename files." "Advanced Options" should all be blank except the leave-pictures-on-camera selection. "Apply Metadata" should have only "Basic Metadata" selected with all other options blank.
Of course, one still has the previously imported "altered" files on the PC or Mac even if future duplicate imports from the camera stop. Solving this is simply laborious and time consuming. Import the photos, yet again, using the settings described above. Then use PSE to identify duplicate photos and, one-by-one, delete all duplicates from the catalog and hard drive except for the most recent import, which should in all respects be identical to the file still on the camera.
This worked for me. Hope it helps you.

Import wants to import duplicates--why???

I recently consolidated photos on my server from several places and reconnected all the photos in the PSE6 organizer. As a control to make sure that all of the consolidated photos were in the catalog as expected, I imported from that folder and its subfolders expecting maybe a few that had escaped but nothing else.
Instead, it identified over 7,000 of something like 15,000 files for import.
I spot checked those 7,000 and all the ones I checked are ALREADY cataloged by the organizer. Of course, tags and album assignments and updated dates/times (to unknown) all were missing from the new imports. So, to avoid 7,000+ duplicates in the catalog, I undid the import.
Why are these getting duplicated? What can I do to eliminate the duplicates but get PSE Organizer to know that it has all of these files in the first place???

Dick,
Youve stumbled on a new bug (new to me, anyway) in PSE 6 and 7. After reconnecting a file on a network drive, it fails to ignore case in the filename when you try to reimport that file. Heres how to reproduce the bug on Vista (havent tested on XP):
1. Make a new catalog.
2. Do File > Get Photos And Videos > From Files And Folders.
3. Drill down to a file on a network folder and then click Get Photos to import it. Notice that it will start with all upper case, e.g. \\MYSERVER\.
4. In Windows Explorer, rename the file to a new name.
5. Do File > Reconnect > Missing File to reconnect the file.
6. Drag the file from Windows Explorer into the Organizer window to import it. (This is the way I usually import photos.) It will fail to identify the file as a duplicate and import it again with a lowercase server name, e.g. \\myserver.
7. Examining the database that represents the catalog, the volume table has two entries, one for \\MYSERVER and one for \\myserver.
The only way I know of cleaning up this mess in your catalog is to open the database file with a database tool (e.g. sqlite3) and edit the tables. But youd need to be reasonably savvy about relational databases.
I cant predict the long term consequences of not fixing the problem. It may be simply that PSE fails to identify duplicates on import. Or there may be other consequences were not thinking of yet.
You could try contacting Adobe Customer Support. But theyre likely to take a very long time (weeks) to tell you that they cant do anything. Last year someone had a catalog mangled due to a bug, and he could no longer access tens of thousands of photos archived on CD. Adobe took many weeks to acknowledge it was a problem, had him send a copy of the catalog, but then failed to fix it.

Pse7 - copy tags to duplicate pictures

Hi,
I am in a quandry and am not sure how it happened - apparently my catalog imported the photos from the original spot and the network backup - for some reason I didn't realize it (maybe the duplicates were stacked) but I never did this. Anyway - the problem I have is that many photos are tagged (and I thought that the tags were all on the initial copy) now I have discovered that the tags could be on one copy or the other. Is there an easy way to copy the tags from one picture to another if they are duplicates. Once I do this then I would like to remove the duplicates from the catalog.
Hopefully this makes sense.
Thanks in advance.

There is no automatic way to do this in PSE -- you have to do it manually, photo by photo, tag by tag.
If you're talking about hundreds or thousands of photos, you could download the free Exiftool to copy all the metadata from the duplicates back to the originals. But expect to spend at least an hour or two, probably much more if you're not comfortable with command-line programs or know much about photo metadata.

Duplicate photos from root Picture folder

As a result of upgrading versions of LR from 1.0 to now, and not knowing how to do that properly, I've got nested Lightroom and Pictures sub folders in my root Pictures on my Mac system. Is there a way to illiminate duplicate photos, without breaking the LR catalog? There are no duplicates in my catalog.

I have LR pointing, on my iMac, to the "Pictures" folder. Under that, I have sub folders called "Lightroom->Pictures", etc. I have many more pictures and folders under root->Pictures, than I have in my LR catalog. I think upgrading since 1.0 has duplicated on import and created new folders. I want to clean this up now and delete duplicate raw images on disk. I can't do it manually. Too onerous. Hope that makes this simple situation clearer.
Update: Turns out i only have 2k extra images than what appears in the catalog, so maybe not as bad as I thought. Would still like to reorganize the folders so that they make more sense, like illiminating the lightroom->pictures sub-folders.
Update: Found the easiest way to reorganize is to global highlight photos in a sub folder and drag to the higher level folder. LR does all the work and updates the catalog. Solved.

LR4 not identifing duplicates?

Hi!
I just upgraded to LR 4.0 and the identify duplicate function does not appear to be identifing duplicates.
I was cleaning off cards and wanted to make sure all the photos had been added to the catalog when I realized that photos which have been imported, will reimport.
The "don't import suspected duplicates" box is checked. I verified one photo, _img_2597.cr2 , was both on the card and in the catalog.
LR4 re-imported it - putting a duplicate in the catalog.
I then added some new photos to the catalog and then tried to re-load them: the detection of duplicates worked. It apears that photos from the 3.6 catalog are the issue.
I have:
rebooted the system
opened up a backup catalog
synchronize folders
All to no avail.
Any ideas.
Thanks!
Paul

Here's where I came out: the duplicate function does not work for photos
added under any version prior to LR 4.0 (for me). The cause doesn't matter,
whether it is a conversion bug or a bad catalog, I'm still in the same
place: the function doesn't work. After looking at the data base tables, it
appears that the data base design doesn't store the individual elements
which would allow the key field, importhash, to be re-created. I have yet
to read of anything where adobe would acknowledge that they have a design
issue followed by an implementation issue.
You may want to try to rebuild your LR4 catalog and see if that helps. You
can also download SQLite and take a look at the tables (use a backup) to see
if the field is being populated.
Sorry I couldn't help more.
Paul
PS If anybody has any other suggestions please offer them up.

Catalog Confusion

I thought I understood Lightroom 4 catalogs, but apparently not.
I would appreciate help from anyone in the know.
My goal is simply to periodically make manual backups to an external drive--- this is in addition to the backups that LR suggests and puts on my C drive.
The problem is I don't see the catalog where I think it should be. I can find LR's backup folder, and that contains catalogs that look and behave as I expect: (Right clicking brings up the option to "Open in Lightroom.")
I'm running Win7, LR 4.1 RC, selected the default location for my catalog (which is named Lightroom 4 Catalog-2)
The path to my catalog is C:\ Users|Jerry\My Pictures\Lightroom\ Lightroom 4 Catalog-2 Previews.lrdata
The path to my Backups is the same except for the last subfolder C;\.............\Lightroom\Backups
I suppose I could just copy the Backups folder over to my external drive, but I'd still like to understand what is going on, and how to duplicate the original catalog for use in a straightforward way.
Hopefully, I'm making some silly error and fresh eyes will see it. Thanks in advance.
Jerry

Jerry,
It is normal that the catalog file itself (the database) is a lot smaller than the previews folder. The catalog file almost only contains text (it also ZIPs very well, btw), while the previews folder contains images (your previews), which take up a lot more space. In my case, the catalog file itself is 400MB, while my previews folder is 32GB. The size of the previews folder also depends on size and quality of previews rendered.
Recreation of the previews is done from the Library module:
Library -> Previews -> Render Standard Size Previews (or 1:1 Previews, whichever you desire)
This can take quite some time, depending on the number of images in your catalog, but can be run unattended while doing something else.
If you get "Preparing to install", the link between the *.lrcat extension and Lightroom seems to be broken. Try changing the default program associated with *.lrcat by pointing to "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.0\Lightroom.exe" using the procedure described here:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/12196-open-change-default-program.html
This should make Lightroom your default application to open *.lrcat files.
Beat

Duplicates in my catalog

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