How to find blurry / fuzzy pictures

Software
1

Hi,

Do you know of any tool to find blurry/fuzzy pictures in a library ?
Just to find potential pictures to be deleted manually.
In an 8000 photo library it would be a useful time saver.

Note:
I just bought PowerPhotos as recommended by David. I began to sort out the mess in my partner photos librairies. Very useful. In a few minutes I added 200 photos to her library by creating a temporary library, importing 2060 photos in a folder (last time I emptied her camera) then Merging librairies (which deleted more 1800 duplicate).

She came up with this question.
I’m just a Mac nerd, I don’t take neither have any interest in photos.
Just helping cleaning stuff.

2

Photos with low file sizes may be small because the blurriness makes them easier to compress.

See if that can be any help.

1 Like
3

It looks quite complicated, but I did find this blog post which describes how to use various command line tools to compare similar images for relative blurriness.

Edit: There’s also this python library which does machine learning for blur detection https://github.com/WillBrennan/BlurDetection2

I’ve been playing with Will Brennan’s script and it seems to work pretty well!

4

It’s not for everyone but my rule for photos is they only get deleted if they are completely unrecognisable. Even then they may not get deleted unless I come across them in the right mood.

I may end up with more photos but I am nowhere close to running out of space and I save the angst of deciding what to delete.

1 Like
5

I looked at the package content of the .photolibrary sorted by size. The lowest file sizes are sharp photos with a lot of the photo being only one color. Also, some have part of the image sharp and some regions blurry (just normal focus choice - pictures almost come from a “real” camera). But indeed it may help finding too dark photos and some blurry ones to trash. Thanks.

6

yes, quite complicated. But it’s not a surprise to me. Thanks. I looked at ImageMagik. Not sure if I’ll go further down this rabbit hole, but I found :
https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/discussions/2185 AND
Measuring blur
for those who are more Power Users than me.
Seems to be a business opportunity for a developper to add such tools in a user friendly app …
Maybe. Thanks.

1 Like
7

Actually the ImageMagick trick looks pretty promising. The problem, depending on which macOS version you’re on, might be relating the photos’ “names” (i.e. how a photo is identified in Photos.app) to the actual filename. If you’re on Catalina, these identifiers are not the same :frowning_face: I’m not sure when this change took place.