Now that Apple has released its Photos app for OS X, it’s probably a good time to deal with cleaning up your library before migrating it over and moving it to iCloud Photo Library — especially since you’ll need to pay Apple for space to upload your photos to iCloud, and if you have duplicates in your library, those definitely will count. If you’ve already made the plunge and migrated your library over to the new Photos app, you’ve probably noticed that Apple has done nothing to deal with avoiding duplicates, and of course if you’re trying to consolidate photos from more than one place to get them all into a single Photos library, the process can get even more confusing. Fortunately, Overmacs has you covered with PhotoSweeper 2.1 ($10), an update to our favorite photo duplicate management app release, made to specifically add support for the new Photos app.
Of course, PhotoSweeper can still crunch through your Aperture, iPhoto, or Lightroom libraries, or even just folders full of photos in addition to the new Photos library, and can even compare duplicates across all of them, with automatic marking settings that can easily let you choose which libraries you’d prefer to keep the “master” photo in once all duplicates have been eliminated. As before, using the app is really straightforward, and it can even read in your Photos library structure, allowing you to select by year, moment, or album, or just search for photos from directly within its built-in Media Browser. Once you’ve selected your photos for comparison, a “Compare” button provides you with a variety of functions to allow you to choose how you want your photos to be compared, such as only finding exact duplicates or dealing with similar or serial photos. A comparison then groups all of your duplicates, allowing you to go through them individually or use PhotoSweeper’s great “Auto Mark” function to automatically flag the ones you want to get rid of based on a list of criteria including file size, date, time, rating, resolution, or where a given photo is located.