During my three-week trip to Russia, I took exactly 1325 photos. I understood that this trip was likely to be a once in a lifetime exeprience and I was very concerned that I would lose some or all of the photographic record of the experience. As a consequence, I was very concerned that I backup and offload images as I went along. I stored the images on a Macbook Air and I upload images as I went to Flickr. Many of these upload sessions were conducted from unreliable wifi connections. I ended up with a mess – missing images and many duplicates resulting from multiple attempts to restart a batch upload procedure. Since, I do have all the images on the Air, I have decided to transfer the collection to a desktop machine and use iPhoto to reprocess all everything and then upload the collection to Flickr a second time. However, I did learn some things about Flickr from the first attempt and I thought I would share one of these insights here.
What to do when you have duplicates in Flickr
When you review images from the Flick photostream, you see your images based on the sequence in which they were uploaded. To my knowledge, Flickr has no built-in provision for identifying duplicates and will accept the same image as many times as you want to send it. I had hundreds of duplicates scattered throughout my photostream. Here is how I located and removed these duplicates.
There are a couple of settings within Flickr that allow a user to sequence images by the date/time an image was taken. Sequencing images in this fashion will reveal duplicates. For example, Archive allows images to be sequenced by date taken or date uploaded. A calendar view than allows all images on a date to be viewed. This works fine for showing the duplicates, but reviewing images displayed in this fashion was not practical because the process of displaying had to be repeated each time an image was deleted.
The process I ended up using was based on Flickr’s system for organizing images. Typically, you use this feature which displays images from the photostream to build sets. You select individual images from the stream and pull them into a space representing the set you want to construct. I read that the stream of images of images when using the organization system could also be sequenced by date taken. This option is a little difficult to locate (upload sequence is the default). With the batch organize window open, look for a more options link that should appear just above the sequence of thumbnails. One of the options should be organize by date taken. With this option selected, the redundant images should appear next to each other in the stream.
Here is the tricky part. To get rid of duplicates, drag the unnecessary images from the stream into the area intended to create a set of images. Instead of creating a set (which does not remove the images from the stream), select the bulk option “delete” and the duplicates will be removed. Obviously, you will want to do this carefully. I would also only do this if I had a complete backup of all images.
The images in this collection are available for public viewing.
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