Why your Takeout has duplicate photos (and how to keep one copy)

Google Takeout exports every album as its own folder. Photos in an album also appear in the “Photos from YYYY” folder of their year – so the same file is often there two or more times.

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How Rollmend detects duplicates

Files with the same size are compared by content (zip checksum, or a SHA-256 fingerprint of the start and end of the file). Name differences don’t matter. The copy in the year folder is kept; the album names are collected.

Keeping album information

Rollmend-albums.csv lists every album and the output path of each of its photos.
Optional: “Also add album folders” writes extra copies into Albums/<name>/ (uses more space).
Album-only photos (not in a year folder) are exported normally by date.

Other duplicates

Files Google renamed with “(1)” are only treated as duplicates if the content is identical. Different photos that share a name keep both files – Rollmend adds “ (2)” if two outputs would collide. Trash is skipped unless you include it.

Questions and answers

Will edited copies be removed as duplicates?

No. “-edited” files have different content and are kept next to the original, with the original’s date.

Last updated: 2026-10-26