How to merge iPhoto Library and Remove Duplicates!

From Year 2002, Apple is providing one of the most popular Apple applications called iPhoto along with Every Mac System and there are millions of iPhoto users worldwide that have imported and manipulated trillions of photos using this great application. When you plug your iDevice to your Mac machine, iPhoto leaps to the assistance.

Merge iPhoto Library

Of course there are some ups and downs with iPhoto application too and one common question which is in thousands of iPhoto user’s mind is how to merge iPhoto libraries and remove duplicate items. This thing go more challenging when there are many copies of Library and it looks very complex to control.

People who love photo and photography always keep huge number of photos (generally in multi-thousands). The thing which users understand is that the more pictures are present in iPhoto Library, the more its size increases and it will impact on the performance of iPhoto application. Every time a user import a batch of pictures, iPhoto creates a new roll in the photo pane and this is done everytime you import photos. After few years you can see that there are hundreds or even thousands of rolls present.

In iPhoto 08 Apple came with an organization tool called Events that help simplify the grouping of photos. By defeault every roll is an event and however unlike rolls events can be merged by dragging one event on the top of another or can select both the events and choose the merge events from the event menu. iPhoto will ask and confirm whether you want to merge items present in both events and then create one iPhoto event that contains the content of both the events. It is good if you have smaller group of events to handle. After merging, related photos can be viewed at one place and the unnecessary photo can be deleted manually.

What if you have Multiple Libraries in iPhoto?

In this situation you need to browse and merge multiple iPhoto Libraries and this is quite a cumbersome task. It’s because you may have backup of iPhoto Library on same disk or other disks or on a same or another computer which contains same or different pictures and this means you have to deal with merge number of libraries that are at same or another location and contains unique or duplicate pictures.

To browse different iPhoto library, hold option key while iPhoto launches. This way you can see a list of available iPhoto Libraries present on your computer disk and from here you can also create a new library. It’s a simple way to browse older data and older libraries and switch between many libraries.

iPhoto is capable to remember the last used library and therefore remember to quit and re-launch iPhoto when the Option key is hold down second time to reset the library back to original location.

To handle more iPhoto libraries or to merge iPhoto library to make a single library, the best available application is iPhoto Library Manager. It has several features including merge or split iPhoto libraries. Of course if you have large iPhoto libraries (in several Gigabytes) then it will take probably hours to merge or split iPhoto libraries but it is still better than doing things manually.

Remove Duplicate Photos in iPhoto Library

After merging events and libraries, you may see that there are duplicate copies of photos present and to remove duplicate files directly, Apple has not provided any tool of function in iPhoto. To fix this issue and remove duplicate photos from iPhoto library, there is a small but useful application called iPhoto Duplicate Annihilator. It scans pictures in iPhoto library and tag all the duplicate copies that it find by putting the Duplicate in the comments. You can also set the preferences according to your choice. Once the scanning is completed, you need to go to iPhoto and search for duplicate in the comment. Items which appear with the duplicate tag should need to be deleted.

Note: If you are trying to edit the iPhoto Library on disk then beware as this way iPhoto Library Data loss and iPhoto library corruption can occur at any time.

Since iPhoto Library is a collection of nested folders and files that contains original photos, edited versions, thumbnails etc. There are folders named as contents, data, caches, thumbs, modified and originals, data segments etc and all are kept in a sorted order so don’t try to manually edit iPhoto Library.

If accidentally you have done the not-to-do step mentioned above, and facing the problem of iPhoto Library Corruption, there is only one way to fix all again and it is using iPhoto Recovery Software. It can solve your problem of corrupted iPhoto Library problem and easily give your all those memories that you had lost due to iPhoto Library Corruption. Below is the link to download iPhoto Recovery Software.