Why is this shortcut duplicating photos in my library?

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I thought this shortcut had been working, but now it appears that it's not just adding images to an album, it's actually duplicating the photos in my library. Each time the shortcut runs, I see old photos reappear in my recents, and when I view the photo in All Photos, I see that it's been copied.

This seems like bad behavior but I don't see anything in the shortcut itself that would do this, and I don't see any kind of option to add a photo to an album as opposed to "save" a photo to an album.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/aab66f09690d4050ad9ffa7b8d8ba19b

Ideas?

Posted Feb 28, 2023, 4:16 AM UTC

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mvan231•3 yr. ago

Check out the method here: https://reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/grsc4i/_/fs0ru8c/?context=1

Edit: u/plymouthvan i tried to cut down the shortcut and ended up with this, which seems to be workijg in not making duplicates.

i think you had an extra save to recents in your shortcut that might've made it tricky. also, as a note: when you save a photo to your albums, they automatically will show in recents

max_potion•3 yr. ago

The action you're using "Save to Photo Album" has a note that says "If a photo passed as input is already in the specified album, the photo will be duplicated."

It seems you're saving photos to "Recents" multiple times in your Shortcut, so yeah, this would duplicate the photos.