Locally run web app + Chrome extension to delete duplicates in Google Photos. Built with:
While a hosted web app would be ideal, one is not currently provided due to API usage limits, the overhead of Google's app verification process, cost, and user privacy considerations. Instead, follow these instructions to get the app up and running locally:
1. Install Docker Desktop on your system.
2. Clone this repository.
4. Set up local environment variables.
cp example.env .env
FLASK_SECRET_KEY
with python -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex())'
and add it to .env
.GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID
and GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET
from the client_id
and client_secret
values from the client secret file created above.docker-compose up
from the project directory.If you found a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue.
If you have questions about the tool, please post on the discussions page.
debugpy
is supported. See launch.json
.I've been a long-time user of Google Photos. When Picasa Web Albums retired, my cloud photos and albums moved to Google Photos. I have used nearly every desktop client Google provided from Picasa, to the old Google Photos desktop uploader, to Google Drive's built-in Photos integration, and finally to Backup and Sync.
Google has improved duplicate detection upon upload in recent years, but that wasn't always the case. I have tens of thousands of photos across hundreds of albums that were at some point duplicated by a desktop client. Also, even today, deleting, re-uploading, then restoring a photo results in a duplicate.
This could probably be solved by clearing out my Photos data and re-uploading everything. However, that would remove all album organization and photo descriptions. Instead, it's preferred to remove duplicates in-place. Searches show interest in this feature from the Google Photos user base, but it hasn't ever made its way into the product.
The existing tools I could find for this problem did so only with media on the local computer, felt scammy, or didn't fully automate the deletion process. So I created this one.
It turns out the Google Photos API is quite limited. While apps can read limited metadata about the media items in a user's library, they cannot delete media items (photos and videos), and they can only modify media items uploaded by the app itself. This means we can't, for example, add all of the duplicates to an album for the user to review. This necessitates some kind of tool to automate the deletion of duplicates. Since we've already bought in to the Google ecosystem as a Photos user, I chose to do this with a complementary Chrome extension.
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