'Duplicate' pictures in Google Photos

muziqaz

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For me duplicates appear whenever I share the photo either on facebook or flicker. And has anyone checked their camera folder through PC? Every photo has folder of the same name. So I have 100 photos, and next to them I have 100 folders with identical names as photos. I have no idea what's the reason for all this, but I do not approve :/
 

Don Teeter

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I am seeing this problem from a different perspective which suggests the problem is with the phone.

I use a Galaxy S6. I was seeing duplicate photos and videos when they were automatically uploaded to Dropbox. I found it very annoying and assumed it a Dropbox bug. But I opened a ticket and worked with them on it. I determined that the phone alters the photo files some hours after they were taken, and if by then it had been uploaded to Dropbox, then the new version is uploaded as a duplicate, whereas if the backup hasn't happened yet, we don't see a duplicate, just the modified file.

I don't know what my phone does to pictures but it adds 57 bytes and this is evidently the change that triggers upload. Nor do I know when it happens. Sometimes an hour after the picture was taken, sometimes many hours. Maybe on those occasions there is no duplicate in the cloud, that modification had happened within minutes.

Camera / phone manufacturers need to address this. I don't know what to do but having duplicates in backup creates too much extra work.
 

lutin

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You may have already tried this, but have you turned off "Events" in the S6 gallery application?

I used to have the "duplicates" issue, but it has completely disappeared since turning off the automatic creation of Events.
 

Alanhd

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You may have already tried this, but have you turned off "Events" in the S6 gallery application?

I used to have the "duplicates" issue, but it has completely disappeared since turning off the automatic creation of Events.
I saw this when I started to use events as well.
 

KatieBlue

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Same issues on S7 Edge. Could it be tied to the issue that Photos app has when you try and delete an image that is on the SD? When I try that it tells me that it can't delete image because the app doesn't have access to my SD card. Which is not true.
Im trying to figure out how to give it access bc every time I try to delete in photos, and bc there are duplicates it's often (I thought I was crazy or trigger happy or something! So glad to see this post!) but it says I can't delete in photos until I give SD card access but I don't know how! The camera and the app have every permission granted that im aware of! Can u help? So far GP hasn't been any help. :(
 

jennyjo1967

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Well. Chiming in in 2017 and I'm STILL getting dups. And totally random, as was stated in someone else's post. I'm on a S6 edge. Arrrgh!
Any update on this issue is greatly appreciated

UPDATE:
just saw the post about turning off "events" in photos. Can someone tell me where to find this?
THANKS A TON!
 

brablc

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Same here on OnePlus 5. My guess is that it is the lossless optimized version of the same file that is uploaded to the cloud and shown as duplicate. This is the one without full path. I have setup Google Photos to upload files in their original resolution - the resolution is the same, but the file size is smaller.
 

Michael Sullivan11

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Hi people of AC,

Anyone else noticing 'duplicates' of their pictures in Google Photos? I'm not sure if it's just HDR pictures (and if so, I can't seem to find a way to disable the phone saving more than one picture), but for some reason I don't think that's the cause. I've seen this reported a couple times on the Photos forums and it seems to be only on S7's... Here are my 'symptoms':

1) Duplicate photos seem to be random (might be HDR, but since I take HDR in Auto, I have no way of knowing which ones were taken that way)
2) Details on the duplicate pictures differ. One has the full device path just like the other pictures, leading me to think that's the actual and non-duplicated file, and then the other one only has the file name, no path, and most of the time, a smaller file size, which makes me think it's just the online version. But why are they duplicated?
3) This is where it gets strange. The pictures aren't really duplicated. If I access Photos online or on another synced device, the pictures aren't duplicated, it's just showing up that way on the Edge.

Weird, huh? Anyone have any ideas?



yes, i too am having the same problem with photos & it's killing my storage!!! How do you fix this?
 
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Golurk

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It shouldn’t be HDR....I have an S7 Edge and HDR is automatically on, yet I experience no duplicate photos (unlike with iPhones).

It might just be a glitch to be honest. You could try restarting your phone. It might be that you have the ‘tap screen to take photo’ function on and accidentally take more photos without realising.
 

B. Diddy

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I've seen this happen before when I have to turn automatic backup off temporarily for some reason. It may be that interrupting the backup causes occasional duplicates to occur on the device.