Can Microsoft Photos Find Duplicate Photos On Mac

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Finding duplicate files on your Mac is like finding a needle in a haystack: takes either superhuman patience, or a metal detector duplicate finder app. In this post, we’ll go over both manual and app-powered ways to remove all the useless copies that waste your disk space.

Apr 11, 2016  How to Find and Remove Duplicate Files on Windows. Duplicate files waste precious space on your computer’s hard drive. Especially if you have. Dec 28, 2018  To find duplicate photos on your Mac, do the following: Download Gemini for free and launch it Click Scan for Duplicates. Your Home folder is pre-selected, so Gemini 2 will check all files on your Mac. 2) Apple photos has no way to search for duplicate photos, they suggested that users 'manually search for duplicate photos'. 3) Apple support do not recommend third party apps to remove photos as they can damage the library. For this task, you can use a free utility from Nektony called Duplicate File Finder for Mac which allows you to find duplicate images and any other duplicate files in less than a minute. Our duplicate picture finder provides the best features to quickly delete duplicate photos from your Mac or from an external drive: Fast scanning algorithm.

So, here’s how you can find and delete duplicate files on Mac:

Dec 28, 2018 Solution: The best photo duplicate finder for Mac. The problem with duplicate and visually similar photos is so commonplace that here at MacPaw we created a professional duplicate image finder, Gemini 2. Let’s take a closer look at how it can help you sort your photos. Apr 14, 2018  But not all duplicate finders are safe to use, see: Using third-party apps to remove duplicate photos might damage your Photos for macOS library - Apple Support. Do not use any duplicate finder, that will delete photos from the Photos library directly. Use only tools, that collet the items in an album, so you can delete them using Photos.

  • Hand-pick the copies using Finder
  • Find them with a Terminal command
  • Use a duplicate file finder app.

There’s a chance you don’t feel like digging through all your folders or messing with the command line in pursuit of duplicates. If that’s the case, skip the first two options and get yourself an app. We recommend Gemini 2: The Duplicate File Finder — it lets you scan your whole disk, review the duplicates, and delete them with a click of a button. Or, if you’re ready to get your hands dirty, there are still the manual options, and we’ll take a closer look at them now.

How to find duplicate files using Finder.

There’s supposedly a trick that makes Finder reveal your duplicates in a list, but we tested it and it didn’t work. Bummer. This means you’ll have to check all your folders for duplicate files one-by-one, so let’s identify which ones to begin with. If you were a duplicate, where would you be? The truth is you can find duplicate files anywhere on your Mac, but most of them sit in these locations:

  1. Your Photos library
  2. Mail Downloads
  3. Your Downloads folder

These folders end up full of duplicate files for different reasons, and you’ll have to approach them differently. Let’s go over each one.

Photos library

You move a bunch of new photos onto your Mac, import them into Photos, and start sorting them out. Been there, done that, know all about it. What you probably don’t know is that all of those pics now exist in two copies: one in the initial folder (say, Documents), and one in Home > Pictures > Photos Library. So, if you save photos onto your Mac first, and then import them into Photos, every single pic is duplicated. That’s where gigabytes of your disk space go.

Now, how do you find these duplicate photos and get rid of them? Depends on how much you rely on Photos for viewing and organizing your pics. If you never liked the app anyway and have backups of all pics in other folders, just go ahead and empty the Photos library. Remember two things here, though:

  1. Delete your pics in Photos only when you’re 100% sure there are copies of them in other folders. Would be a shame to lose memorable shots.
  2. When you delete duplicate files in Photos, they are not removed — just moved to a Recently Deleted folder. This means they still exist on your disk, so if your goal is to free up disk space, don’t forget to empty that Recently Deleted folder.

In case you use Photos as your primary app for images, keep in mind that it only displays files stored in Home > Pictures > Photos Library. So, to keep using Photos for your pics, you’ll have to remove those other copies that are stored elsewhere. Here’s how you can find them:

  1. In Photos, open the Photos tab to see all your pics sorted by date.
  2. In Finder, open All My Files to view all your pics in bulk, not in a dozen individual folders.
  3. Sort the files by Date Created, so that your pics in Finder are listed more or less in the order they’re listed in Photos.
  4. Now comes the tedious part. Take a group of pics in Photos, created within the same day — say, April 17, 2015. Go to Finder, spot the 2015 section, and find that identical group of pics (they will be located together, so you just need to look carefully).

Repeat step 4 for all the pictures you have in your Photos library. That way, you’ll find and remove the duplicate photos that are stored in other locations, and keep only the pics in your Photos library.

As you may have guessed, this is going to take a while, especially given that All My Files will include documents, videos, and other files you have, not just your photos. So, to save you a few hours, we suggest you use a duplicate finder app for the job. Gemini 2, for example, easily finds duplicate photos and shows you where each of them is located. It even autoselects the duplicate pics that are stored outside your Photos library, so all you need to do is hit Remove, and they’ll be gone. You can download Gemini 2 for free and see how it works.

Mail Downloads

Here’s a common scenario: a colleague emails you a document, and you open the attachment in Mail to take a look at it. You’re going to need this file, so you download it onto your Mac for safe keeping. No duplicates, nothing to talk about here. Right?

Not exactly. See, the Mail app has quietly downloaded this attachment the moment you opened it, and stashed it in its very own downloads folder. So once again, you now have two copies of the exact same file on your Mac.

The Mail Downloads folder is not what you’d call “intuitively located”: to access it, you need to know where to look. Do the following to find it:

  1. Open Finder.
  2. In the Menu bar, click Go > Go to Folder…
  3. Type this address:
    ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads
    and hit Go.

This will reveal the folder you’re looking for, so open it and look through the contents. In this case, you don’t even have to compare them with the contents of your other folders: everything in here is simply local copies of the attachments you’ve opened. They are downloaded by Mail just so attachments open faster, and Mail can re-download them any time from your emails. So, even if these files don’t have duplicate counterparts somewhere else on your Mac, they’re pretty much useless for you. Make sure there’s nothing you would miss, and empty the folder altogether.

Downloads

Unless you set the browser to ask you where to save a file, everything you download is automatically saved to the Downloads folder. Over the time, you can easily forget whether or not you’ve downloaded this PDF or app installer before. When it gets saved automatically, it’s hard to notice the “(1)” in the file name that indicates you already have something like this. So, you just keep downloading the same files again, and they keep piling up in your Downloads folder. How to find duplicate files in there? That’s relatively easy:

  1. Open the Downloads folder.
  2. Select Cover Flow view (this one’s the handiest, because it lets you both sort files by name and preview them).
  3. Sort your files by the Name column and look for groups of files with the same name.
  4. There’s still a chance files with the same name are not duplicates — for example, a few screenshots, creatively named Screenshot, Screenshot (1), and Screenshot (2). So, you’ll want to use the preview to make sure namesake files are actually identical.

The only problem here is that if files have different names (say, one of them was renamed at some point), you won’t detect them just like that. So this way of finding duplicate files in Downloads or any other folder is sort of limited. If you want to remove all duplicate files, whatever they be called, you’ll need a duplicate cleaner like Gemini 2.

See, you can only find the duplicates that have the exact same name, like PlanToRuleTheWorld.pdf and PlanToRuleTheWorld (1).pdf, and that’s how most duplicate finder apps work, too. Gemini 2, however, is a little more sophisticated: it can also detect files that are similar, but not quite the same: have different names, differ visually, etc. This means no duplicate is left behind, even if they tried to lay low and change their identity. You can download Gemini 2 here and see how this feature works, it’s a real space saver. Or, if you’re still determined to beat your duplicates barehanded, try out the second method.

How to find duplicate files with a Terminal command.

Before we dig deeper into this one, make sure you know your way around Mac’s Terminal, because you might mess things up with it. We’ve tested the command below and nothing bad happened, but just be careful what you type into the command line.

So, here’s how you search for duplicate files with Terminal:

  1. Find Terminal in the Utilities folder or using Spotlight search and open it.
  2. Navigate to the folder you want to scan with the cd command. For example, if you want to scan Downloads, type in cd ~/Downloads and hit Enter.
  3. Copy and paste this command:
    find . -size 20 ! -type d -exec cksum {} ; sort tee /tmp/f.tmp cut -f 1,2 -d ‘ ‘ uniq -d grep -hif – /tmp/f.tmp > duplicates.txt
    and hit Enter.

This will create a text file in the folder you’ve specified, with a list of your duplicates inside. But there are two “buts” here: first, Terminal overlooks a lot of duplicates, and second, you’ll still need to find those duplicate files and sift through them to separate the copies from the originals. So, this command is more like a crystal ball: it gives you hints, but you still have to go and do stuff yourself. Which brings us to the third option, where you hardly have to do anything at all.

How it works with a duplicate file finder app.

There’s a ton of duplicate finder tools out there, but we’ll take Gemini 2 as an example, because we’re 100% sure it works. So, let’s say you want to scan all folders on your Mac for duplicates. Here’s what you do:

  1. Open Gemini 2.
  2. Add your Home folder or drag-and-drop it into the app. Hint: in case you don’t know where the Home folder is, just enter your user name in Spotlight search to find it.
  3. Hit Scan for Duplicates.

When the scan is over (which doesn’t take long), you get two options: Review Results and Smart Cleanup.

Free Duplicate Photo Finder

Smart Cleanup means you’ll automatically delete all duplicate files, and the originals will stay where they are. It’s called smart, because the app knows which files are duplicates and makes sure at least one copy of a file — the original — remains on your Mac.

If you want to make sure you remove the right duplicate files, hit Review Results. This will open a window with all your duplicates listed. You can preview files (even play music and videos), see how they differ, and select them for removal the way you want. When you’re done, hit Remove.

That’s pretty much it: Gemini 2 will delete duplicate files in your Photos, Downloads, Mail Downloads, iTunes, and all the other locations on your disk. By far, it’s the easiest way to find all duplicates on a Mac. Download Gemini 2 and you’ll see how simple it is.

Hope this helped you get rid of those sneaky duplicate files that clutter up your Mac and waste your valuable disk space. Go ahead and share this post with other Mac people if you found it useful.

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If you shoot as much as the next photographer, most of your hard drive is taken over by pictures. Now, try to imagine how many of them are duplicate photographs or just visually really-really similar? Chances are, the answer is a lot.

With a digital camera, you shoot about 10-15 takes from one angle or of one posture before you’re satisfied, right? And then you only choose one for editing. That’s 14 pictures that you will never need right there, and that’s every scene of every photoshoot.

You must already be thinking about getting an external hard drive or buying cloud storage and moving your gallery, because your Mac’s space is not infinite. Or you might have already done that. Anyway, in the long run, billions of photos you no longer need keep piling up and it seems like there’s no escape from it. But worry not, there is.

Solution: The best photo duplicate finder for Mac

The problem with duplicate and visually similar photos is so commonplace that here at MacPaw we created a professional duplicate image finder, Gemini 2. Let’s take a closer look at how it can help you sort your photos.

How to delete duplicate photos on Mac with Gemini 2

First, you need to find duplicate photographs in your gallery. Then you have to figure out which version to delete in each case. All that takes loads of time if done manually, and Gemini 2 does 90% of the work for you.

To find duplicate photos on your Mac, do the following:

  1. Download Gemini for free and launch it
  2. Click Scan for Duplicates. Your Home folder is pre-selected, so Gemini 2 will check all files on your Mac.
  3. When the scan is over, hit Review Results
  4. All the duplicate photos you have on your Mac will be grouped under All Duplicates > Images. Click on the group of photos to view them (Gemini has a built-in photo preview).

    5. Bonus tip: If you switch to grid view using the icon at the top, you’ll see bigger previews of duplicate photos. Double click on a group of duplicates to see all copies side-by-side, along with their metadata and location. The icons at the top will highlight the differences between the duplicates, such as location or date modified.

  5. Once you choose which copies you want to delete, check mark them and proceed to the next set of duplicate images by using those little arrows on the sides.
  6. Finally, click Smart Cleanup to delete all selected photos. And don’t worry, Gemini moves pics to a separate Gemini Duplicates album in Photos, so you can look through them once again before you give the final “Delete” command. That’s because Apple won’t let any third-party app delete anything from the Photos library.

If you think you have too many files in your Home folder and want to focus on pictures, try scanning just the Photos app. Here’s how to find duplicates in Apple’s Photos app:

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  1. Download Gemini for free and launch it
  2. Click Restart Now, and then the big “+” in the middle of the screen
  3. Select the Pictures folder and hit Scan for Duplicates
  4. Follow steps 4-6 from the tutorial above

Microsoft word 2011 product key free mac. The Pictures folder contains your Photos library, so this should help you remove all the duplicate photos you have in there.

How to get rid of not-quite-duplicate photos

Once you have duplicates off your Mac, it’s time to take a look at similar photos. See, Gemini distinguishes between exact duplicate photos, which are several instances of the same image, and similars — photos that have different editing or were shot at slightly different angles.

For instance, here are two pictures with and without editing, in the same folder. Gemini will find them for you and mark as similar.

Or here are three pictures that were taken a second apart. You definitely don’t need all three, unless you’re going for an art-housy installation on majestic horse breathing.

Can Microsoft Photos Find Duplicate Photos On Mac Book Pro

To see all the similar photos the app has found, look right next to the duplicates in your left-hand menu.

Go through similar shots just like you did with exact duplicate pictures, selecting those you want to delete. When you’re done, click Remove and delete all unwanted copies in bulk.

Dealing with similars is pretty rewarding in terms of disk space, they usually take up even more than duplicates. After you get rid of similar images it's easy to organize your whole gallery and leave only those pictures that you’ll actually use.

How to remove duplicates from Photos manually

Can Microsoft Photos Find Duplicate Photos On Mac Free

Frankly, I couldn’t find a straightforward way to find duplicate photos in Mac’s Photos app. While the app does give you a heads up if you’re trying to import a pic that already exists, once the duplicate or similar images are there, you’re on your own. However, here are a few helpful tips on removing duplicates in Photos for Mac:

  • View your pics sorted by date (they are automatically sorted that way in the Photos tab). The Photos app groups pictures by the date taken, not the date they were imported. It’s safe to assume your duplicate photos were taken on the same day, so you’ll spot them more easily when they are side-by-side.
  • Try Smart Albums as a way of narrowing down your search. If for some reason Photos doesn’t detect the date taken, you can group your photos by the file name, camera model, and other parameters that might suggest they were taken at the same time. For duplicate photos that have different file names and image formats, criteria like the person in the photo might work.

Final word on removing duplicate photos

We all know that euphoric state in which you return home with an SD-card full of new pictures. We’ve all been there, editing feverishly to publish or print them right away. It’s ok to be a little messy in that moment, but months later you notice that your whole Mac is a mess.

Don’t let those useless files eat up the drive space you need for future photoshoots. There’s nothing more frustrating than the “Startup Disk is almost full” alert when you’re uploading new pictures. It’s best to deal with space wasters with Gemini 2 long before that happens.

Can Microsoft Photos Find Duplicate Photos On Mac Desktop

Have a good day and may the Photoshop be with you.

Can Microsoft Photos Find Duplicate Photos On Mac Free

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