Importing a shared photo stream into iPhoto creates duplicate photos

Question

I have a shared photo stream in iCloud with a couple thousand pictures. (This is not My Photo Stream, but a stream I created separately.) About half the pictures were shared by me and the other half were shared by my wife. I wanted to import my wife's photos into my iPhoto, so I right-clicked on the iCloud album in iPhoto and clicked "Import". This imported all the photos into a new event in iPhoto. It imported all of my wife's photos, but it also created duplicate copies of the photos that I had already shared and were still in my iPhoto library. The photos imported from the photo stream have a lower resolution and file size than the original photos in my library.

My questions are:

(1) How can I automatically get rid of these duplicate photos? I tried one tool called "Duplicate Photo Cleaner For iPhoto", but it didn't recognize them as duplicates probably because the file sizes and resolutions are different.

(2) What should I have done instead to import my wife's shared photos without duplicating my own?

Answer 1

to provide an answer to this old question, as it's still good info to have...

1) The best way at the time to delete the photos would have been to view the Last Imported photos and delete them from there. Not just deleting the duplicates, but deleting all of the photos (basically to reverse the import that was done).

2) What should have been done to import the photos from your wife's phone in to your library is to connect her phone to your computer, and import them from the phone itself, rather than the stream. This way, you are getting the original photos, not the compressed / lower quality versions from the photo stream.

Answer 2

I don't know about the app you tried to get rid of the duplicates, but I've used Duplicate Photos Fixer, it has lots of options for filtering what images it considers duplicates, and its been really useful. I hope it works fine for you too.