Remove duplicate purchased movies in iTunes
Earlier today, I tweeted about duplicates of purchased movies in my iTunes library…
(a) Why do I see this twice? (It was in a bundle I bought from iTunes)
(b) Why is downloaded file much larger?
iTunes, you confuse me. pic.twitter.com/wHLIVQOXyD
— Rob Griffiths (@rgriff) September 21, 2017
With 150 or so purchased movies over the years, these dupes make reading through the movie list quite annoying…
Finally annoyed enough to do something about it, I chatted with Apple Support this morning, and they quickly identified the cause…
Why are there two? iTunes is showing both 1080p and 720p versions of each movie (which also explains the size differences), so you can choose which to sync to an iOS device—you'll save a bit of space with the 720p versions. That makes sense, though the way it's handled seems quite odd and visually annoying.
To prevent this from happening in the future, iTunes support suggested I open iTunes' prefs, go to Downloads, and make sure only the "Download full-size HD videos" box is checked (assuming you want HD). My iTunes had both that and the "Download high-quality SD videos" box checked, so I unchecked the SD box.
I don't really understand how this will prevent the dupes from showing on future purchases, because my dupes are primarily all in the cloud, as noted by their icons, so I wouldn't think this setting would help. But I won't know until I purchase my next movie—changing the setting had no effect on existing duplicates.
But what about getting rid of the existing duplicates? That took a bit of trial and error, but this method seemed to work for me…