Today’s Question: If Lightroom Classic identifies an image as a duplicate in the Import dialog, is there a way in Lightroom Classic to find the duplicate? Sometimes my structure gets a little confused so it’s useful to find the “original” and move it to the right place.
Tim’s Quick Answer: There isn’t an automatic way to identify the duplicate image in Lightroom Classic, so I recommend importing the duplicate and then sorting all photos by capture time to locate the cause of the duplication.
More Detail: Lightroom Classic lacks a feature for automatically locating duplicate images, other than to indicate that an image is a duplicate as part of the import process. When an image is excluded from import due to being identified as a duplicate, however, the duplicate that is already in the catalog isn’t identified.
You could potentially track down the duplicate that is already in the catalog by searching by filename or by date, for example. But I find it is generally easier to track down duplicates by sorting the images based on capture time. This requires that the duplicates both be in the catalog, so to use this approach you would need to import images with the “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checkbox turned off in the File Handling section of the right panel in the Import dialog.
Once the duplicate images are added to the catalog, you can browse them by navigating to the “Previous Import” collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module. Select one of the images you believe is a duplicate, and then select the “All Photographs” collection in the Catalog section of the left panel. In the grid view set the Sort popup on the toolbar below the image preview area to “Capture Time”. This will cause any duplicate images to appear adjacent to the selected image.
In this way you can relatively quickly identify duplicate images visually, confirming the duplication by evaluating metadata details such as capture time and filename. You can determine where a specific image file is located by viewing the Folder field in metadata, or by right-clicking an image and choosing “Go to Folder in Library” from the popup menu. You can then review metadata updates such as star ratings and keywords to determine which image should be kept versus discarded and perform any other updates such as to move photos to a different folder location.
