Duplicate photos - Insync vs. Google Photos

#1

Here is my situation: I usually take photos with my Android mobile phone, which automatically backs up all photos to Google Photos. However, I’m also in the habit of archiving my photos in folders on my hard drive, which are backed up to Google Drive via Insync. (I do this because I may also have other photos, taken with another camera or sent to me by friends, and I want to keep all of the photos in one place.) Google Photos seems to recognise all photo-type files stored in Google Drive and display them alongside those that were automatically backed up from my mobile phone. I.e. it shows that there are duplicate photo files stored in my Google Drive space.

Is there a way to have Insync recognise when a photo already exists in Google Photos and to share that copy rather than uploading a duplicate? If not, do you know of some kind of Google Photos solution, rather than an Insync one? If not, I probably need to change my photo-archiving habits. What would best practice be to avoid duplicates?

Thanks,
Richard

#2

We currently do not deal with Google Photos, only Google Drive, so duplication on Google Photos might not be something we can address.

#3

You also copy these photo’s manually? Why? In Google Drive’s web interface, go to settings. You’ll find a section there called ‘Create a Google Photos folder’ with a checkbox and some additional info: “Automatically put your Google Photos into a folder in My Drive”.
When you have this enabled, you can also sync your Google Photos to a local folder automatically without risking any duplicates. When adding photo’s from an external source I suggest uploading them via Google Photo’s instead of saving them to a synced folder. I’m not sure if Photos has duplicate detection when ‘sideloading’ pictures though but at least you will have everything in one place if you decide to attack the problem with 3rd party software like Free Duplicate Photo Finder.. Perhaps you can even avoid this altogether by moving external images to your phone.

I personally have Google Photos for my Android mobile as well to take care of the photos and screenshot taken with the device. On my PC, I use Adobe Lightroom to deal with pictures from all kinds of sources (including my kid’s Vtech camera). I regularly insert an SD card with pictures I’ve already synced but Lightroom does the heavy lifting in terms of duplicate detection in this case. Pictures that were already added to the library are simply excluded from the import. All of these images instantly show up in my Google Photos library as the library folder is synced to Drive.

Regards
Timmy