Yet another question on duplicates in the organizer

[ajrivers]

Wow...I've been reading posts on duplicates for a couple of hours and I can't seem to find one that answers exactly what my issue is so I'm sorry if it's out there already.

First off...I'm using PSE6 although I started off with PSE4 and that has cuased some of the problems. For whatever reason I've ended up with lots of photos that have multiple duplicates each. I know that I could either sort by date and go through and delete them OR do a "find by visual similarity" and find them one at a time, but I have 15K+ photos so I'm just trying to figure out if there is a faster "batch" method. The metadata should all be the same for the pics and just the file name has changed, but they are generally very similar....IMG-123-1 and IMG-123-2 or IMG-123-1-1 are all common versions I see. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks! Amy

[wellingsk]

I had the same problem a while back and found the easiest thing to do is to go to File and choose catalog. Create a new catalog and then reload your current pics into the new catalog. If you have duplicate photos on your hard drive, it will still load the folders you specify, so make sure you don't actually have duplicates before you import to the new catalog. (i'm assuming you don't want the duplicates on your hard drive) Once your satisfied, you can delete the old catalog or not. There may be a better method, so check back here for a while to see other responses. In the mean time, creating another catalog won't hurt anything, but it might end up helping. Another way is to 1st delete the duplicates on your hard drive that you don't want and then do a reconnect in the organizer. after it's done searching, you can remove the thumbnails PE6 couldn't find.