Help matching edited photos to their originals (Mac)
February 13, 2025 4:35 AM Subscribe
I have a folder of photos directly off a digital camera. I want to match them to another folder of edited photos with different file names.
This is a MacOS question:
I have a large collection of photos off a digital camera I'm going to print. These have the file names the camera's given them (e.g. PC202337.JPG).
I have another large folder of photos that I have imported to my iPhone and edited in an app (Darkroom) over the last few years. These have been edited for colour, tones, etc. A few will even have been slightly cropped.
I just discovered that iPhone has renamed these files (e.g. IMG_9401.jpg). To the human eye they're obviously the same photos, but they now have a new timestamp, new name, new file size, new pixels. Some metadata seems to have been maintained.
I want to cross-match these photos so that any in the original digital camera folder are replaced by their edited version in the Darkroom folder. Or at least flagged/identified as "the same photo".
I've been searching for photo comparison apps but most seem to compare on file names, file size, hash, etc. Maybe I'm wrong and they can also compare on *gestures vaguely* visual similarity? I also have a frustrating sense that there was a question on Ask in the last 6 months where someone recommended a promising app for this, but can't find it.
Thanks for reading!
This is a MacOS question:
I have a large collection of photos off a digital camera I'm going to print. These have the file names the camera's given them (e.g. PC202337.JPG).
I have another large folder of photos that I have imported to my iPhone and edited in an app (Darkroom) over the last few years. These have been edited for colour, tones, etc. A few will even have been slightly cropped.
I just discovered that iPhone has renamed these files (e.g. IMG_9401.jpg). To the human eye they're obviously the same photos, but they now have a new timestamp, new name, new file size, new pixels. Some metadata seems to have been maintained.
I want to cross-match these photos so that any in the original digital camera folder are replaced by their edited version in the Darkroom folder. Or at least flagged/identified as "the same photo".
I've been searching for photo comparison apps but most seem to compare on file names, file size, hash, etc. Maybe I'm wrong and they can also compare on *gestures vaguely* visual similarity? I also have a frustrating sense that there was a question on Ask in the last 6 months where someone recommended a promising app for this, but can't find it.
Thanks for reading!
Response by poster: Thank you for finding that thread, samj!
For anyone else who ends up here: I downloaded dupeguru and scanned my two folders.
I first tried scanning based on Contents, and had only a few matches on _very_ identical images (perhaps ones I hadn't actually edited).
After this I tried running a scan on EXIF Timestamp and it appears to have matched all my images, or at least enough for me to think it's matched all of them. So the EXIF timestamp had been maintained through all the edits and exports.
Still figuring out how to rename and/or integrate the edited photos back into the main folder, but this seems to have given me the clear list I wanted.
Thanks for the quick help!
posted by distorte at 7:01 AM on February 13 [5 favorites]
For anyone else who ends up here: I downloaded dupeguru and scanned my two folders.
I first tried scanning based on Contents, and had only a few matches on _very_ identical images (perhaps ones I hadn't actually edited).
After this I tried running a scan on EXIF Timestamp and it appears to have matched all my images, or at least enough for me to think it's matched all of them. So the EXIF timestamp had been maintained through all the edits and exports.
Still figuring out how to rename and/or integrate the edited photos back into the main folder, but this seems to have given me the clear list I wanted.
Thanks for the quick help!
posted by distorte at 7:01 AM on February 13 [5 favorites]
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posted by samj at 5:30 AM on February 13 [3 favorites]