I recently painstakingly migrated my photo library of 15+ years (over 100gb) from google photos to iCloud. I suspect many more will be doing this in the future as google recently announced they will no longer be doing unlimited storage for photos. The problem here is that the library exports originals as well as an -edited
version for those files you have changed in google photos. I've tried multiple automatic tools and had some luck with photosweeper but am sure that i still have a few gb of undetected duplicates hiding in there. In some cases Photosweeper just doesn't seem to be sophisticated enough to find them - For example photos from a scanning service that all have the same date, or edited versions where i have rotated and changed the aspect ratio.
Complicating this is the way Mac OS automatically manages photo storage on the machine, so i'm hesitant to attempt to run any scripts on underlying files that might corrupt the library. In a perfect world I would just do something like
- find all files matching
(.+)-edited.{jpg,png,heic}$
- where there is a matching file without the -edited
- select and delete/trash the non-edited version
- in a way that is safe for my photos library
An alternative might be to start over completely and use the google drive app on my desktop to download and copy all pictures that way, but i'm worried i would lose files that way too.