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Comment by mrexroad | Hacker News Reader

I have ~2.5TB of photos in iCloud, via Apple Photos. Excluding the various sized previews, I doubt many originals have been accessed in quite a while. I also have about 1TB Lightroom library archived to a different service; representing countless hours of photo processing work spanning over a decade. Haven’t touched that one in years. Neither are crap. (Yes, both have other backups and, yes, I’ve probably forgotten to sync one of them).

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Sometimes I wish there was a feasible system to audit and reduce redundant photos in my iCloud. I have an embarassing ton of pictures that I never look at just like everyone else. I wouldn’t mind a tool that said “here’s 10^x photos that are the most similar to all your other photos would you like to put them in the trash?”

Thing is, the tool needs you to pick the one instance that survives the purge. Which means looking through 10^x of mostly similar photos to pick one.

Removing duplicates isn't that complex already, and these tools exist so anyone can try it. It's just a truely grueling process.

Yeah, there have been a number of companies that say they'll offer AI Photo Culling, but I have yet to find one that actually does it.

Can you recommend any particular tools to do this?

If you’re using Apple Photos, the feature is there. It will detect both exact copies as well as (nearly) identical visual duplicates. Look under utilities.

Maybe it's different on the desktop, but on the iPhone it only detects the same photo that may have been saved at different resolutions or things like that. That's useful, but I really want something that can say use an embedding or something to group all 10 photos I shot of friends around the campfire and help me select one keeper and delete the other 9.

The feature works the same on iPhone. Looking through my duplicates just now, the detected duplicates that had a dozen or so photos to merge, are either high speed sports photography bursts or astrophotography—the rest were just mostly two photo duplicates. I suspect the threshold for determining a the photo as duplicate is too high for successive* photos to be considered such, as with your campfire example.

With that said, I’m surprised Apple hasn’t implemented a feature to group/bundle successive photos beneath what is determined to be “best.”

[*] Note: successive photos being separate shutter taps/actuations (potentially several seconds apart), where bursts are continuous (generally as fast as hardware allows, ms apart).

I download them 200 at a time then delete the selection.

I have about the same in iCloud and then dozens of drives of video footage. Beyond the "keep it in case you need it" aspect, another angle is that it's often cheaper to just keep everything than spend all the time it would take to do a thorough cull. Video is much slower to review, but also chews up far more space, so maybe that balances out.

Crap is in the eye of the beholder...

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