Duplicate photos are very common in any computer even on Mac. These duplicates are saved inside our devices without being aware of.
It could usually happen because of multiple downloads of the same photos, editing media files and saving it with a different file name, and many more instances. Good thing, there are many programs that offer duplicate photo finder for Mac; available online that assist us in dealing with duplicates.
Part 1. How to Manually Find Duplicate Photos?
Photos mean a lot to us, they are memories and witnesses to the various situations, emotions, and places we had been. Whenever I have time, I edit a few of them and share it on my social media sites or save them on my computer.
Saving them on different devices help us keep these images safely and for future use. However, as we keep on using, editing, and sharing these pictures, we tend to have duplicate copies all over our computers.
Later on, these duplicates may affect the performance of your device and may contribute to its slowness. I mean, these photos take a lot of space in the system, right? So what are we going to do with the duplicates? Delete them.
Manually Locate Duplicate Photos
As we accumulate these images, little do we discover that these files are already clogging up our system until we notice it slowing down?
Finding duplicate photos on Mac takes time especially when you have saved the images in different file locations.
-
Open a Finder window and go to Users, find your Username and click on Pictures or Photos Library. We will start from this folder because this is where all the images are saved by default.
-
Start by sorting the images by “Name” and select the option to preview the file
-
Find all duplicate photos. You can individually right-click and “Move to Trash” or you can highlight all and move to the trash bin.
-
After removing all the duplicate images in the Photos library, go to the “Recently Deleted Files” section and empty this folder too.
You can do the same process in the Downloads folder and the desktop. If you saved the images in different folders, you can open those folders too and do the same process.
Manually removing duplicate photos on Mac is a long process but if you can find quicker methods such as using duplicate photo finder for Mac, then better.
Part 2. How to Find and Remove Duplicate Photos on Mac Quickly
iMyMac-PowerMyMac’s Similar Photo is an excellent duplicate photo finder on Mac because of its convenience, ease of use, and powerful toolkits. The Similar Photo feature of PowerMyMac will search and remove the duplicate photos scattered everywhere on your Mac.
Similar Photo has almost the same function as the Duplicate Finder. However, Similar Photo is specialized in finding images while Duplicate Finder searches all types files including documents.
Apart from finding doubles, this process is going to free up and speed up your Mac too.
PowerMyMac Features:
-
An all-in-one toolkit
-
Smart cleanup feature
-
3 Powerful Features: Status, Cleaner, and Toolkit
-
Similar Photo toolkit features accurate duplicate comparison
-
Locates image files in different extensions such as: .jpeg, .jpg, .gif, .png, .ico; even amateur and professional extensions like .psd, .pxm, .cdr, .tiff and more
All you need to do is to download and launch PowerMyMac and do the following:
1. After successfully downloading the program, launch it and go to the main menu
2. If you want to know how your Mac is doing, you can go to Status and diagnose its health
3. Proceed to Cleaner toolkit and Click on Similar Photo
4. Click the Scan button to allow the software to locate all the duplicate photos
5. Wait until the scan is complete
6. Browse the scan result and tick on the duplicate images you want to erase.
7. Click the Clean button to remove duplicates
8. Tap Confirm to remove the images completely
The total cleanup depends on how many duplicate images you have saved on your Mac. You now have completely removed all the duplicate photos on your Mac without spending too much time in finding and deleting them one by one.
Bonus Tip!
Since you are already on the process of removing similar photos on Mac, why not also take advantage of the Duplicate Finder tool where you can free more space on your system by erasing other duplicate contents including documents, videos, archives, music, many more.
Part 3. Remove Duplicate Photos on Mac via Terminal
Another quick method to remove duplicate photos on Mac is by using the terminal. This method helps you save more time going on each folder manually and delete the duplicates. In the terminal window, you can easily remove duplicates because the command displays folder locations with potential similar images.
Here’s the complete step by step guide on how to remove duplicate photos via Terminal:
Launch Terminal by going to Applications and then Utilities. You may also search is using Spotlight.
Inside the command line, you can use the cd command to help you go to a specific location. For example, cd ~/Pictures will retrieve the Pictures folder.
Enter: 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 – this command will help you find all duplicate files (including photos) and will create a .txt file containing these files.
Go to Finder and look for these specific files mentioned in the .txt file; from here you can move them to trash.
Remember to empty the trash folder too after deleting the duplicates.
Part 4. Summary
In this article, we have discussed the different ways to find and remove duplicate photos on Mac. The first option we had was a manual method which I personally find it time-consuming.
The second option was better which was to use PowerMyMac- Similar Photo program. This method was way better and faster plus the added toolkits it offered.
Lastly, we learned how to find duplicate images by using the terminal command line. This option is quite tricky and not beginner-friendly. However, you wanted to perform duplicate photo finder for Mac, choose wisely.
