Today’s Question: I know you’ve shared techniques for locating duplicate photos in Lightroom Classic in the past, but do you think Adobe will ever add a duplicate finder feature to the software?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I suspect that at some point (but I have no idea when it might be) Adobe will add duplicate detection in Lightroom Classic, since this is something I consider to be a significant pain point for many photographers. While there are some plug-ins designed for this purpose, in my experience they aren’t particularly effective.
More Detail: Duplicate photos is a common issue that photographers run into, caused by a variety of factors. It therefore feels like a bit of an oversight that Adobe has not added a feature to Lightroom Classic for the purpose of identifying existing duplicate photos.
In fairness, of course, identifying duplicate photos isn’t quite as simple as it may seem. There are the obvious duplicates, for example, where the exact same file exists in more than one storage location unnecessarily. Of course, you need to be able to distinguish between an unwanted duplicate and a backup copy, but this isn’t too difficult an issue since the backup should be stored on a different storage device from the original.
When there are duplicates, you also need to be able to figure out which is the “real” master file. For example, you may have applied different metadata updates to each of the duplicate copies of a given photo. Ideally, a duplicate detection tool would be able to analyze metadata and even automatically merge the metadata so nothing is lost.
There is also the issue of duplicates that may or may not be real duplicates, and may or may not deserve to be treated as a duplicate you might want to delete. For example, if you create a derivative image for purposes of creating prints of a photo, you might want to preserve that copy so additional matching prints can be made with ease. But there may also be cases where you’ve created a derivative copy, such as a JPEG to share online, but you don’t really want to keep that copy and would therefore treat it as a duplicate to be deleted.
In my view the Lightroom Classic catalog provides a valuable benefit when it comes to potentially identifying duplicate photos, and I’m hoping Adobe will address this at some point in the near future. In the meantime, unless other tools are released, the only real approach that I recommend is to sort photos by Capture Time and manually review for duplicates, evaluating the images to determine whether there are duplicates you want to discard, or just duplicates serving some other purpose that you want to preserve.
