Picasa and iPhoto Picasa and iPhoto were great apps. Both were free. Both allowed you to manage your photos locally and both allowed you to take pictures with photo cameras, or your phone, and sync them then you got home. Over time our phones synced via the cloud to these apps.
We lost the habit of getting home and ingesting photos because everything was done automatically. We took pictures and they appeared in Picasa and iCloud and we didn’t think about it too much.
As I write this my consolidated photo album is being uploaded to kDrive, to serve as an offsite backup but the journey to this point took about two weeks, due in part to experimentation and learning to use various tools.
Tools I used rsync Google Takeout Flickr Export jdupe Gemini Euria Le Chat, by Mistral Work Flow The first step is to request your data from Google Photos via the Google Takeout Tool, the Flickr Export tool for flickr, and to download all your photos locally from Apple Photos before disconnecting the local library from iCloud.
I chose to experiment with Le Chat by Mistral, the French AI alternative to Gemini, Claude and CatIFARTED (ChatGPT). For the experiment I copied my Photoprism photos from the drive I use that is connected a Raspberry pi to a laptop before running scripts to sort and remove duplicates. It worked well, with a nice little bonus which I’ll expand on later.
Goal: Clean Up Duplicate Photos My objective was to Remove duplicate photos from a large collection while keeping the best version of each file.