Glossary
Duplicate product images
Definition
Why duplicates are a problem
Duplicates add weight without adding information. Extra copies of the same image increase the media a page loads, which can hurt Core Web Vitals, and repeated images across products give search engines less unique signal to work with.
They also make the admin harder to manage, because it is not obvious which product a given image really belongs to when the same file is attached to many.
Exact matches versus near-duplicates
Some duplicates are exact copies of the same file. Others are near-duplicates: the same photo resized, re-saved or renamed, so a filename check misses them. A perceptual hash compares the visual content of an image, so it catches near-duplicates a filename comparison would not.
For a walkthrough, see how to find duplicate product images, or run the free duplicate image scanner.
See also