I finally took the time to figure out why I’ve been getting duplicate photos imported for a while now. What’s been happening is the photos are automatically downloaded on my Mac via photo stream, and then when I import via USB, the photos app doesn’t recognize them as already being imported, and it imports them again. It’s been driving me crazy. It used to automatically skip any that were already imported, which made it easy to just import the videos and other random stuff that didn’t make it into photo stream like edited photos. Then after importing, I would delete everything in the camera roll using image capture.
Tonight I was looking at the EXIF data to confirm they were really duplicates and realized they have different file extensions. The one that comes from photo stream is a jpg and the one that comes from USB is an HEIF, the new high efficiency format.
Apparently, Apple is using the new format in iOS11 and has all kinds of compatibility stuff in place. You can turn off HEIF (in the camera settings on the phone) and only take JPGs, or you can allow it to take the pictures as HEIF, but then when you share a picture it automatically converts it to JPG if it’s not certain the recipient/destination can handle HEIF (this is the default). You can also force it (in the Photos settings on the phone) to always use the HEIF format when importing via USB, even if it’s going somewhere that can’t handle HEIF (like an earlier version of the OS), but that doesn’t help me.
I’m pretty sure what’s happening is it’s taking the picture as an HEIF, and then converting to JPG when it uploads to the photo stream because the photo stream photos could theoretically be downloaded on a system that can’t handle HEIF. Then when I connect via USB, it’s keeping the HEIF format because I have High Sierra and it knows I can handle it. Therefore, I end up with both versions. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get it to use HEIF in the photo stream.
Seems like my options are to switch to jpg in the camera settings and lose out on the space savings of the new format, or stop downloading photo stream photos to my Mac automatically. I think just for fun I’m going to try changing my Photos settings to force it to use the original HEIF format when importing but based on what I find online, that only impacts transferring via USB (not via photo stream), and USB isn’t my problem.
Here’s a thread about it: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8093807
Update: Or, according to the thread below (and I think I’ve seen this somewhere else too), I can turn on iCloud Photo Library and then it will sync the HEIF version.
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