Adobe Lightroom is one of the most powerful photo editing and management software which is a favorite amongst photo editors, graphic designers, and many other photo enthusiasts. It comes with a wide range of photo editing tools, nondestructive editing and provides a seamless workflow. Despite being an efficient tool, users often have to deal with duplicate photos in Lightroom.
These duplicate photos can create several issues. For instance, if left unchecked, duplicate photos in Lightroom can clog up your computer’s storage space. Not just that, they can clutter the catalog and therefore, make organizing photos a challenge.
Before we dive into the various ways to find similar and exact Lightroom photos, let’s first quickly have a look at reasons why duplicate photos occur in Adobe Lightroom.
Why Do Duplicate Photos Occur In Lightroom?
You might have to duplicate photos in Adobe Lightroom for a variety of reasons such as –
1. You may have accidentally imported the same photos or might have multiple import sessions.
2. Shooting photos in RAW and JPEG format and saving photos in both.
3. Under File Handling settings, check the box that says Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates option. This way when you import photos from the same folder, Lightroom will not import duplicates.
4. Copying and moving images with the catalog can also lead to the creation of duplicate photos.
5. In case you only change the resolution of a picture, Lightroom will create duplicates.
6. When you export images from Lightroom to some other photo editing tool like Photoshop or Luminar, Lightroom creates duplicates.
7. Merging catalogs or restoring backups can also lead to the creation of duplicate photos in Lightroom.
How To Remove Duplicate Photos In Lightroom?
While manually sifting through Lightroom Duplicates is one way to delete them, but, you may accidentally end up deleting the wrong files. Plus, it goes without saying that it is a time-consuming process.
How about using a tool that can help identify Lightroom duplicates in a snap? You can use a utility like Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro. The tool is available on all major platforms – Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. For the purpose of this post, we’ll take into account the steps for finding and removing similar Lightroom photos on Windows PC.
Step 1 – Download, install and run Duplicate Photos Fixer on your Windows PC.
Step 2 – From the bottom right-hand side, click on the dropdown and select Lightroom Classic
Step 3 – Select the Comparison Method and click on Scan for Duplicates.
Step 4 – Click on the Auto Mark option to select one duplicate image in each group.
Step 5 – Click on Delete Marked.
How To Manually Delete Lightroom Duplicate Photos?
In case you have a handful of Lightroom duplicate photos, you can use the Library Filter Bar to detect duplicates. To do that –
Step 1 – Open the Catalog section and select All Photographs.
Step 2 – You will be able to see the Filter bar at the top. If you are not able to see it, click on the forward slash “/”symbol on your keyboard.
Step 3 – Click on Text.
Step 4 – As the first attribute, you can set Filename followed by Start With as the second attribute. Enter the search term in the search bar. You can enter the filename here.
Step 5 – You can now delete duplicate copies of photos.
Using Plugins To Delete Duplicate Photos From Lightroom
Even though Adobe Lightroom itself doesn’t have an inbuilt feature with which you can detect or delete duplicates, you can use third-party plug-ins to do that.
Teekesselchen is a useful Lightroom plugin that can help you remove duplicate photos from your Lightroom catalog. To do that follow the steps mentioned below –
Step 1 – Click on File and then click on Plug-in Manager.
Step 2 – When the Light Plugin Manager pops up, click on Add. Browse and locate the unzipped Teekesselchen plugin file.
Step 3 – Once the plugin is installed and activated, click on Done.
Step 4 – Click on the Library dropdown, click on Plug-in Extras, and then click on Find Duplicates under the Teekesselchen folder.
Step 5 – The plugin will mark duplicate photos with a Rejected Photos flag. Carefully go through each of these.
Step 6 – Remove the ones that you don’t want to delete. As for the remaining photos that you wish to delete, click on Photo and select Delete Rejected Photos.
Time To Declutter Lightroom’s Catalog
Deleting duplicate and similar photos from Lightroom will help streamline your catalog and also optimize storage space. It will also help increase work efficiency and you can focus on editing images editing images. In reference to that, a utility like Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro can be a powerful tool. It can dive straight into your Lightroom catalog and identify the right duplicates.
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