importing old photos from numerous hard drives

[karenl1370232]

Hi  I'm new to Lightroom have version 6 and am trying to sort through thousands of photos taken over 15 years.  question is.  when I import a photo it may have the same file name but would be different photo or same photo with a small file size for EG from my photo stream or I phone.  how do I know if Lightroom will import the both of the photos ?  I want to eventually keep only the larger size photo ! of each one.  and intend to them use Photo Sweeper to pick out the duplicates... and keep only the one large file of each photo..  ​

[dj_paige]

Use Photosweeper to pick out the duplicates before you import the photos into Lightroom. Then import whatever is left into Lightroom.

[karenl84766454]

Thank you.  One of the problems I have is that I have 3 hard drives formatted to windows and I use Mac   So these are already in Lightroom .. What I was trying to clarify if Lightroom picked only exactly the same photo being name size and exif .... Will it import one that has different exif and size but same everything else ?   Otherwise I'm going to have to start again grrrr... 90,000 photos !!

[ManiacJoe · Accepted solution]

Lightroom will skip what it considers to be duplicate files. To Lightroom a duplicate is same name and same size and same date.

If you end up with multiple files in your catalog that have the same name but different sizes, you can have LR sort the library grid by file name, which will put your "duplicates" side by side for easier finding.

[karenl84766454]

Thank you Joe....