Photos and Duplicates - Grrrr!! But Hours Later, Success!

 I've been playing with Photos and smart albums.  I like smart albums a lot, but I'm running into an issue where I'm seeing LOTs of duplicates within the Photos app.

As mentioned in the prior post, I've made a backup (and I've removed the duplicates).  I think I'm going to delete everything that's in my Photos app and then import all of the photos that is in my backup archive.  I'd have to start over with my attempt at organizing using smart folders, but that's OK.

You'd think that Photos would have a built-in duplicates management system.  Supposedly, iOS does, but I didn't see the feature in my Photos app on my iPhone 13 Pro Max (using v15.6).

I haven't taken any pictures or videos in maybe a week, but I'll be sure to check and backup any recent videos and photos before I commence with this project.

UPDATE:

From my Notes - 

8/13/2022

I started playing with smart albums in Photos on my MBA.

I ran into the issue of many pictures having 3+ duplicates.

I want to start fresh (I’ve a backup of my photos, and the backup has zero duplicates).

I deleted the photos that are in the Photos app on the MBA, then went to disable Photo in iCloud.

Since iCloud will wait for 30 days to delete the photos, I logged into iCloud from a web browser, and am currently deleted them all manually.  iCloud won’t let me delete more than 1,000 pictures at a time, and waiting for the deletion to complete takes a few minutes.

UPDATE - deletion is done.

I had to wait until iCloud registered that there were no more photos/videos being stored (I waited for the iPhone to show no files in Photos as well).

Importing the photos from my backup drive was trivial.  I went from 2500+ files to 1,586!

I re-enabled Photos in iCloud (in the Settings configuration panel on the MBA).  I’m currently awaiting for the iCloud backup/sync process to kick in now.

I deleted all the tags I was using, since there were duplicate tags too (some were all lower case and some had the first letter capitalized - gahhh!!)

I kept my smart folders, though…there was nothing wrong with those and I can edit the filters easily.

This refresh worked better than I’d thought!

One thing I need to ensure of is that I positively need to backup my backup (I’ve a beefy NAS).  It’s already holding my iTunes music (which I also cleaned up - it had a ton of duplicates too, and wasn’t well organized).

It’s late right now (3:30 AM).  I’m waiting for tomorrow to finish up this project and for iCloud to backup the photos I’ve just restored.

————

It’s now 4 PM.

I checked at 12 PM and iCloud had just finished backing up all the videos and photos.  That took quite a while and the dataset wasn’t all that large, either (27 GB).

I spent the last 2 hours creating keywords and assigning them to the photos and videos.  Since I’d kept the old Smart Folders, I just had to adjust them to use the new keywords I’d created.

This is REALLY nice.  As well, the keywords that are assigned to the photos appear to be synced with my iPhone, as I can now search the photos on my phone using the keywords that I created and and assigned.  I’m wondering If I should do another backup now, to solidify those keywords - I do NOT want to have to create and assign keywords again.