[X4U] Duplicate files

[Richard Gilmore]

On 30/11/05 1:53 AM, "Stroller" <macmonster at myrealbox.com> wrote:


> Coming to this late, I'm sure that this has been discussed already in
> the last few weeks, possibly on the Unix 4 Mac list. A number of usages
> of `find` were suggested, IIRC, but I'm not sure that iPhoto, on
> startup, would be happy about files in its index that are missing
> because they've been removed by another program.

I've deleted photos from the iPhoto library in the past without any
problems.
 
> I believe you can tell iPhoto to rebuild its index by holding down a
> command key as you start it up but IMHO the best way to remove
> duplicates already within iPhoto would be to use an Applescript to call
> the iPhoto delete functions, so that iPhoto is aware of the file
> changes; 

What sort of Applescript? Would I have to write one? I don't know the first
thing about Applescript and I have no idea how I would use it to "call" the
iPhoto delete function and make it compare every file name.

> I'd personally MD5 the files to ensure they're duplicates
> you're removing, not just ones with the same name (and so that you
> don't get duplicates with different names).

MD5? Mulitple Delete?
 
> IMHO the best way to handle all your back-ups is to delete all of those
> from iPhoto & start again.

This gives me a headache just thinking about it. I've got over 18,000 photos

> Copy all the photos off the backups into
> _folders_ then you can trivially run `for foo in `ls -R`; do md5 $foo ;
> other stuff ; done`.

I don't anything about Unix either. "foo"?

> I would only import into iPhoto once I was
> confident I'd recovered all the photos I was going to be able to get
> and removed all duplicates.
> 
> Stroller.
> 

If I have to do something radical like deleting the whole iPhoto library and
re-importing I guess that's what I'll eventually do but I'd rather not.