 Hey this is Adam with Photonerd University and today I want to talk to you about something that could be happening to you and you don't even know it. It's in relation to duplicate images inside of Lightroom. And if you think that by simply turning on the do not import suspected duplicates button in the import dialog section is going to save you from importing duplicate photos, well you're wrong and I want to show you why that is. Here we are inside of Lightroom doing a little bit of spring cleaning for the upcoming New Year and as I was doing this I started to move some photos from one folder to another folder. And in doing so I immediately got this message that said this could not happen because these files already exist in that destination. While I was a little suspicious of this I thought I'd do a little bit of investigating to find out if these were in fact duplicate images before I took it to the next step. So what I did here to figure that out was select one of the images in question and look at the file number that this particular photo is. And if I bring this up to a larger view this is a picture of my daughter Zoe. You can see that the file number is 98.59. Well if I go to that folder where I tried to move this and search for 98.59 it will bring up an image and if I zoom in this is a picture of my other daughter Ellie and you can see that clearly this is not the same photograph even though it has the same file number 98.59 and 98.59. This is a problem because had I not double checked to make sure that these files were in fact duplicates I would have probably most likely flagged this to be removed at some point or even just deleted it right now and then this photo or this memory would have been gone forever. The moral of the story is don't take these alerts as face value because it's quite possible that even though it thinks it's a duplicate it's not actually a duplicate. So you're probably going to ask me next what's the solution for this and to be quite honest with you I haven't really discovered one. So right now I'm kind of just proceeding with caution. There are some third party plugins that you can use with Lightroom to help you with suspected duplicates. One of my favorites is one called Lightroom Duplicate Finder imagine that and what it does is it installs some smart collections into your collection section that allows you to look for any suspected duplicates and it will also create these collections as to smallest largest pixel size and many many other things. But even this isn't a foolproof option for looking for suspected duplicates. It works fantastic but sometimes it doesn't get it right either and therefore you'll need to go in and do some investigating. But if I head into all duplicates and take a look around you'll see that there are quite a bit of duplicates. In this example there are two duplicates but the file information is different. One is a raw file and the other is a DNG file which is in fact a raw file but just a different type. But it was able to know that these two were the same file and now I get the option to say do I want to keep the raw file or do I want to keep the DNG file I can flag whichever one I'm not going to keep and delete that one. So there are some options but the moral of this story and the moral of this video is to be aware that what might look like a duplicate might not actually in fact be a duplicate. Do your homework do some research check it out for yourself. If you like this video give it a thumbs up if you have any questions or suggestions as it relates to duplicates we'd love to hear about it. Leave us a comment down below and in the description we'll also leave a link to the Lightroom Duplicate Finder plug-in so you can check that out and as always thank you so much for your support see you in the next episode.