Deleting the Duplicates

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As I try to get my 43,000-photo library under control, I find photos from my life.

R22 with Stagecoach
This isn’t one of the duplicates, but it is one of the oldest photos in my Photo Library. Shot in 2002 with a Canon Powershot 300 camera, it shows my first helicopter, a Robinson R22 Beta II, parked in my hangar. That is an authentic 1800s stagecoach behind it; I got the hangar, in part, because I agreed to store the stagecoach. That same stagecoach is now on display at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, AZ.

I’m in the midst of a big project to downsize my computer setup. For years — heck, since I started computing in 1984 — I’ve always had a desktop computer. When I began writing books about how to use computers in the 1990s, I added a second desktop. And then a third when I started writing books about Windows. After a while, those extra computers turned into more practical (and space saving) laptops. When I started traveling, the Mac laptop went with me. Eventually, I stopped writing about windows and ditched the PC laptop. But that left me with a desktop and laptop Mac. (And an iPad, but that serves an entirely different purpose.)

I’m traveling more and more these days and my current Mac desktop — a loaded 2007 27″ iMac — was giving me a lot of trouble. Slow performance, weird error messages, system lockups. It definitely needed help, but since I mostly used my laptop — a stripped down 2021 13″ MacBook Air — I just didn’t get around to tracking down the problem. The only thing I really used the iMac for was video editing and when I got burned out doing that, I hardly used it at all.

Now, as I plan for an extended journey on my boat, I started to think long and hard about why I actually had a desktop computer. I loved the big screen — and the second 24″ monitor set up beside it — but it certainly would not fit on my boat. Besides, did I need it? Apple had just released a new 15″ MacBook Air with a faster processor and SSD hard disk. After a lot of thought, I realized that a machine like that could probably replace my current laptop and the desktop computer that was giving me so much grief. When I learned that Apple would give me a $500 credit toward the purchase of the new computer if I traded in the old one — which had only cost $1,000 two years before — it was a no-brainer. I took the plunge.

Moving the Files

Unfortunately, the problems with the iMac came to a head as I was getting ready to make the new computer purchase. I’d connected my iPhone to the iMac to manually copy the 3000+ photos I’d shot during my 5 months on the boat from December 2022 through April 2023. For some reason, about half the photos were copied to the iMac and deleted from my phone and I couldn’t get the iMac to take the rest.

Insert long boring story about troubleshooting here. Actually, no. You don’t want to read it any more than I want to write it.

Rosie and Lily
One of the duplicates: my dog Rosie, front and center, while Lily’s attention is elsewhere behind her. This was shot at Roche Harbor in September 2022.

I eventually used Disk Utility to determine that there were directory issues on the iMac’s main hard disk. It would need to be reformatted to be fixed. By that time, of course, Finder had stopped working and I couldn’t do a damn thing on the iMac, let alone open the Photos app to see if the missing pictures were actually there.

I had two backups. One was a Time Machine backup, but I didn’t trust its integrity enough to rely on it for restoring my data. The other was a SuperDuper! backup that basically duplicated the disk. It was a few days old and I couldn’t remember whether I’d made it before or after copying those photos.

Understand that I wasn’t very worried about the rest of the data on the computer. My important documents either live on or are backed up to the Cloud. I mostly use Dropbox for the important stuff, but I had some other stuff floating around on various other clouds that I had free space on. I also had very important stuff backed up to my web server at my ISP.

It was the pictures that concerned me. Judging from what was missing from my phone, it looked as if trip photos from December through at least February were missing. The only place they currently existed was in the Photos app library on that sick iMac hard disk. (If they were there at all.)

I was worried.

Insert more geeky computer-fixing tasks here. No, not really. I’ve already written more about this than I wanted to.

End of long story: I was able to copy all of my Home folder to an external hard disk. So I now had three backups of my data and could move forward to put them on my new MacBook Air, which, by this time had arrived and already received files from my old laptop. That old laptop was already in Apple’s hands.

As I still struggle to understand how the Photos app on Mac OS works with my iPhone to collect photos behind the scenes, I did the simple thing: I copied my 500+ GB (not a typo) Photo Library file from the backup to the new computer’s Photos folder. When the disks stopped whirling, I wound up with a 43,000-photo library on my new computer.

And that entire computer is backed up throughout the day every day to the Cloud. (Yes, I’ll add Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups when I start traveling and have sketchy Internet access.)

Colorado San Juan ConfluenceThis was one of the first duplicates, from 2006. It’s an aerial view of the confluence of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers over Lake Powell. If the water levels get anywhere near this high again by next year, I’ll be putting my boat in the lake for a few months in autumn 2024.

Deleting the Duplicates

Duplicates
Here’s an image from Photos showing some duplicates. I’ve already gotten rid of at least half of them. These photos are from a cruise to Alaska I took back in 2019 on a 70-foot, 90 year old wooden boat.

And that brings me to what I really wanted to write about here: deleting the duplicates. You see, the Photos app has a feature where it’ll go through the database of photos and videos and identify duplicate images. It then displays them side by side and offers a button (that looks like a link) to merge them.

Of course, I didn’t know how it worked at first. When I clicked the sidebar item labeled duplicates, Photos dutifully began looking for duplicates among the 43,00+ images. I waited. Nothing happened. I had chores in town so I left it to do its thing.

When I returned, the computer was sleeping. I woke it up and did some other stuff before I remembered the task I’d given it. I switched to Photos and saw that it had found more than 2,000 duplicates. That’s when I learned that I’d have to go through them one by one to delete them. I settled down with my dinner to start the task.

And that’s when I started seeing my life flash before my eyes.

Well, not really. Not in that dramatic you’re-about-to-die sort of way.

Instead, it was random photos, in chronological order, from my past. It started with aerial shots I’d taken — or maybe my wasband or a client had taken? — from my old helicopter over Lake Powell in 2006 and progressed to various photos shot since then. Some of them were great snapshots of amazing places while others were mundane photos of my dog or a sunset or builders using a forklift to bring huge sheets of sheetrock through the door on my deck into my home under construction. They were snapshots of my life, taking me through the years.

David B
This is the David B, a 70-foot, 90-year-old wooden boat I cruised on, with just 3 other passengers, from Bellingham WA to Ketchikan AK in 2019. I captured this image with my drone.

I don’t know why some photos were duplicated and others weren’t. I do know that there are more duplicates in later years than in earlier years — but then again, there are also more photos from later years. The photos from 2006, for example, would have come from an actual camera. I had a Canon G5 digital camera in those days; my Nikon was a film camera. It wasn’t until my trip to Alaska in 2007 that I finally bought my first DSLR. And even then, those photos would have to be manually added to iPhoto (in those days) on my Mac.

What the hell?

It’s hard to believe that I used to write books about using Mac computers when I barely have a clue about how the “new” Mac OS features work. Truth of the matter is, when I stopped writing about Mac OS, I stopped updating the OS regularly. I became a mere user, and not even one who cared about running the latest and greatest version of the OS. My iMac is still running Maverick; I resisted upgrading to that as long as I could.

What does that mean? It means that there are a lot of Mac OS features that I simply don’t use or understand these days. How Photos and my iPhone work together is a perfect example — they’re obviously doing something together that I don’t know about. I’ve come a long way — mostly down — from knowing how everything works. It’s weird and it bothers me a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. I spend far less time in front of a computer than I did for the 20+ years I wrote about them.

And that’s kind of nice.

But nowadays, almost all the photos I take are taken with my iPhone. Why not, right? It has a great camera. I take photos every day — sometimes dozens of them. I suspect that in more recent years my phone started uploading them to iCloud which then somehow put them on my iMac. Or maybe when I got home and was connected to the network and my iMac was turned on, some sort of transfer happened. I don’t know (and yes, that bothers me.) When I manually added them using a cable — yes, I’m old school — I got duplicates.

Anyway, the plan is to remove all the duplicates first and then go through all the photos, delete the ones that are crap, and pull the ones I don’t need off my computer for storage on some sort of archival media. Probably hard disk drives (duplicated, of course) and/or CD-ROM discs. The goal is to get that 43,000+ photo library down to a more manageable 5,000 photos. And I suspect that’ll take a long, long time.

Until then, I’ll enjoy this look back through the last 10 to 15 years of my life, which have been full of travel and adventure and all kinds of new and exciting things.

Do It Now at Roche Harbor
The last of the duplicates is this great sunset shot from September 2022 at Roche Harbor. It was my first trip in Do It Now, a two-day cruise from Olympia and San Juan Island for the Ranger Tugs/Cutwater Rendezvous. This photo was shot the evening before I started the trip back to Olympia, just me and my pups.

Back It Up, Folks!

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If you’re not backing up your important data, you’re just waiting to lose it.

I was chatting with a fellow pilot the other day about archiving all the videos we accumulate with our GoPro cameras.

“I went to the store and bought a 5 TB hard drive for under $100,” he told me. “Every single photo or movie I ever recorded is on that disk.”

“How often do you back it up?” I asked.

He looked at me blankly. The truth is, he didn’t have a backup for it. He had every photo on one hard disk drive and it wasn’t backed up.

Hard Disk Crashes Happen

I’ve lived through more hard disk crashes than the average person. I’ve even lost a manuscript to a hard disk crash. I think it was that loss that taught me how important it is to back up every file I don’t want to lose.

As I type this, my 5 year old iMac is copying files from its internal hard disk to a backup disk. The iMac has been acting funky for a while and it got to the point where it just wasn’t functioning at all. I booted from the internal recovery disk and ran Disk First Aid on it. It found sectors it couldn’t fix. When I restarted from the normal startup disk, Finder wouldn’t work. For those of you who use Windows and don’t know Mac OS, it’s as if Windows won’t open anything for you. The solution was to go back into Recovery mode, make a new startup disk on an external hard disk, restart the Mac from that, and back up all my important files onto that new hard disk.

You might say, “Maria! Didn’t you already have a backup?”

To that, I say, of course I did. I actually have TWO backups of the entire going bad hard disk. But how can I possibly know if both of them are good when the source is bad? Why take chances? I’ll copy all the files over to make a third backup I know is good. Then I’ll reformat the bad drive and, hopefully, the problems will go away. Then I can reinstall the data files on the newly formatted hard drive. Or, in this case, on the computer I bought to replace it anyway. (I need to get that old iMac running to trade it in for the maximum cash back.)

As for backups of the new computer — a brand new 15″ MacBook Air I got to replace a 2 year old 13″ MacBook Air and the 5 year old 27″ iMac — I’ll periodically back up to an external hard disk, but I’ll also likely back up to the cloud. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s a good and reliable solution and I’m already paying for that cloud space. It would be dumb not to do it.

My Media Storage Solution

Going back to my GoPro and other media situation…

My media file archives and backups work like this: Each year, I buy a pair of 2 TB portable hard disks. I name one for the year and one for the year followed by BU. So this year’s disks are 2023 and 2023 BU. As I travel about, I copy all of my photos and videos from my phone, my Nikon, my GoPro, and my DJI drone to the hard disk for that year, organized by date. So a folder containing the videos from a flight I do today might be named 061923 Wenatchee Flight. When I get home from my travels, I use an app like SuperDuper to synchronize the two hard disks, using the primary one as the source. So if I add or remove files on that primary disk, those changes are automatically reflected on the backup disk.

Understand that the video files I accumulate are huge and take up a ton of storage space. The more I have, the more disk space I need. I’m trying very hard to keep total storage per year under 2 T, but this year I wound up buying 5 T drives because that’s all I could find. I’ll still just put one year’s worth of files on it.

If any of my original or backup disks go bad, I still have the other disk for that year. To lose a whole year’s worth of media, I’d have to lose both disks, which are seldom in the same location for any considerable length of time. To lose all my media, I’d have to lose all of my disks — there are about 6 years’ worth at this point so that’s 12 hard disks.

My friend, in my opinion, is putting all of his eggs in one basket — and that is never a good idea if you don’t want to lose all your eggs.

The Crate

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The story of a piece of “furniture” I’ve owned for 41 years.

The crate arrived in the US in 1981, delivered to the Manhattan home of the parents of the guy I was dating back then. It was a large crate, but it arrived from Hungary containing only 12 bottles of Hungarian wine, all nestled in tightly packed straw. Even after the careful packing and protection, one of the bottles arrived broken.

The crate was well made of solid wood pieces. It was heavy — probably about as heavy as the wine it contained — and, as you can imagine, a wealthy couple living on the Upper East Side with a view of the Queensboro Bridge had absolutely no use for it once the wine was removed. Their son, a senior at Hofstra University did, though. He was living in a dorm room and it would make a nice piece of furniture.

The Crate Becomes Furniture

So he brought it back to the dorm, put a pair of hinges on its lid to make a door, and installed a shelf and some cup holder hooks inside it. He then stood it on one end and put his dorm-sized refrigerator on top of it. It made a nice addition to his 9 x 12 dorm room.

I don’t remember if I came into the picture before or after its arrival. I dated Stew for about a year, breaking things off not long after we graduated. I seem to recall him adding the hinges, which means it arrived after I did. But I don’t recall getting the big thing from Manhattan to Hempstead. So who knows? It doesn’t really matter.

When we graduated and moved out of our dorm rooms, he offered up the crate, since he planned to go back to his parents home in Manhattan and definitely didn’t need it. I took it. I liked crate furniture. (I still kind of do.)

The Crate in My Homes

Between my college graduation and today, I’ve lived in exactly five homes.

The first was my first apartment right out of college, which I moved into in spring 1982. It was in a sketchy area of Hempstead, NY, on the sixth floor of an apartment building with windows that included a view of the Hoftstra dorm towers. It was a large studio apartment with separate kitchen and dressing room/closet between the main room and the bathroom. In hindsight, it was actually a nice place, although the area, as I said, was sketchy. A few of my friends were afraid to come visit me. I never had a problem there.

I fixed up the studio into two rooms by placing three tall veneered particleboard bookshelves between my sleeping area and my living room. I had my original bed — the twin I’d grown up sleeping in — and a lot of junk furniture. The crate became my “coffee table,” sitting right in front of the Ikea fold out sofa.

In summer 1983, I met my future wasband. In January 1984, he and I moved into our first apartment together, a third floor walkup in a row of houses right over the Cross Island Parkway in Bayside, NY. The crate came with us. I honestly can’t remember where we put it in that three bedroom apartment. It may have been in the spare room, which became a cat hair infested storage space until I was forced to find homes for my two cats — my future wasband was allergic and had asthma. (To this day, I wish I’d kept the cats and found a home for him.)

Two years later, in January 1985, we bought our first house together. It was an interesting home made entirely of reinforced poured concrete with something like 40 jalousie windows — that’s the kind you crank with a handle to open slats. Built in 1926, it was unique and would have been a fixer-upper if you didn’t mind working with a sledgehammer. On a quiet street in Harrington Park, NJ, there was a Conrail freight train line just beyond the backyard. For 11 years, I lived with freight trains literally a stone’s throw away from my bedroom window.

The crate became the coffee table in the TV room. It was probably around then that we started storing board games in there. By this time, it was used lying on its long side with the hinged lid on the top.

In 1997, my future wasband and I made the move from the New York metropolitan area to Wickenburg, AZ. This was a huge life change. We bought a brand new spec house on 2 1/2 acres of horse property for the same price as the old house along the tracks in New Jersey. Our cost of living plummeted and our quality of living soared. I was in my late 30s and it was my first full-time taste of living away from a metro area. I loved it. (I thought my future wasband did, too, but after hearing from my sister about some of the places he’s lived since we split, I’ve begun to suspect he prefers suburbia.)

My Crate
Here’s the crate in my previous home. Both it and the comfy brown leather sofa that was in that room made the move with me to Washington state.

The crate came with us. It became the table in our TV area on the second floor. We still stored games in it. And I even have a picture of it there, since it was mentioned in an old blog post I wrote while going through my divorce.

In 2013, as my divorce dragged on, I packed up the crate and moved it into storage. When the movers came in September of that year, they took it with everything else all the way up Washington State, where I’d leased a hangar for my helicopter and had plenty of room for my cars, boat, and storage of furniture and household items. The crate — and most of my other stuff — lived in storage for nearly a year.

On May 20, 2014, we broke ground for my current home. By my birthday at the end of June of that year, the shell of my home was finished with the concrete slab laid. I had a party and my friends helped me move just about everything out of the hangar, across the river, and into my new garage. Including the crate.

As my various posts about building my home detail, I did a lot of the interior work on my home myself. Once I had a space to get work done, I started collecting tools. Eventually, I needed a miter saw so I could cut lumber to build a workbench and other things. The saw I bought did not come with a table. I decided to use the crate as a miter saw station — after all, I had more than enough furniture from my old house and wouldn’t need the crate as another coffee table. I put wheels on the bottom of the crate — nearly everything in my garage has wheels so I can move it — and mounted the miter saw on top. I put new shelves inside the crate to store saw blades and related parts.

And since then, I’ve used the saw on its crate table to build all kinds of things out of lumber: a workbench, 8 garage shelving units, a jewelry bench, two chicken coops, and small tool tables. I also used it extensively while finishing the upstairs of my home to cut Pergo for the floors, lumber for stem walls and rails, and trim throughout my home. The beauty of the saw on that table is that I can roll it anywhere I need to in the downstairs space when I need it and then roll it out of the way when I’m done.


Here’s the crate and its saw in its current location. I’ve set aside a 12 x 12 section of my garage as a workshop for building and repairing things. The crate has been the home for my miter saw for 9 years now.

The Crate Today

I’m in the midst of a huge garage reorganization project and I finally found what is likely to be the “forever home” for the crate and its miter saw. I’ve been tooting my progress on social media — Mastodon — with photos. This morning, I looked at a recent toot that showed a photo of it and thought about my history with this crate. I think I’ve owned it longer than just about anything I currently own. I can’t remember a single thing — other than a handful of keepsakes from my childhood and college years — that I’ve owned longer.

And that inspired me to share this blog post.

I have no real emotional attachment to this crate — please don’t think I do. It’s just its utility that makes me respect and keep it. Someone took the time to build this out of nice, strong wood. It crossed an ocean carrying just 12 bottles of wine and came close to being discarded. Instead, it’s had a long life as part of my life — and it continues to serve me to this day.

How many things do you own that you can say the same about?