Iphone/ipad photos app vs macos photos app

Eclipse2025 · January 10

Tldr: does the mac os (on a mac mini from last year) photos app, do the exact same things as the iPhone/iPad photos app in terms of functionality?

so I daily drive an iPhone 15 and going through the images on my phone I noticed a while back that it can pretty easily find duplicates of photos I've saved from the various parts of the the internet.
and instead of trying plug in a x terabyte hard drive into my phone to try and do the same thing i figured the mac should be able to do it just the same. However it’s been a hot minute since I've used it on mac os.
Are both apps exactly the same in that aspect? or is there something better on windows or mac that isn't either; gonna cost me an arm or a leg in buying it, a stupid subscription fee for 10 years to handle it, or just straight up relying on the new ai overlords to shift through hundreds of Gb of data?

thanks in advance.

Kilrah · January 10

It does have the functionality, but like everything with Apple it operates on its library so you can't just plug a drive and have it scan it in place, you'd have to import everything into Photos first.

Eclipse2025 · January 10

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

It does have the functionality, but like everything with Apple it operates on its library so you can't just plug a drive and have it scan it in place, you'd have to import everything into Photos first.

Oh good, the import part im not worried about, as long at the picture quality and folder structure isn’t sacrificed. Thats fine.

Kilrah · January 10

8 hours ago, Eclipse2025 said:

as long at the picture quality and folder structure isn’t sacrificed.

Try it on a small sample first, because AFAIK it is. I.e. when you import it makes a copy in the "photos library" with its own folder structure and you would need to export again to get the individual files back.