Sep 19, 2018 Learn how to locate and remove duplicate files on any mounted disk or folder in a macOS. Here're the simple ways to select specific user folders to scan for duplicates, the fastest way to scan an entire drive, and the laziest way to find duplicate music and photos on your Mac. Here are 26 best free duplicate file finder software.These duplicate file finder software let you find duplicate files easily. All these duplicate file finder software are completely free and can be downloaded to Windows PC. These duplicate file finder software offer various features, like: finding duplicate files in hard drive and other external drives, find and delete duplicate files to.
Duplicate files on your Mac take up space, slow down performance, and complicate file management. But finding and deleting all the duplicate files in hundreds of gigabytes of Mac storage seems an insurmountable task.
That’s why you should use a third-party app to do it instead. In this post, we’ve explained how to use two of the best apps for finding and deleting duplicate Mac files. We even explained how you can do it yourself using Finder, if you prefer to do things the hard way.
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Related:A Word of Warning About Third-Party Apps
There’s a veritable clone army of third-party apps designed to find and delete duplicate Mac files. All you need to do is perform a quick Google search to find yourself inundated with options.
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But you shouldn’t be quick to trust any of them.
For an app to find and delete duplicate files on your Mac, it needs access to all the data on your computer. This includes a lot of personal information, which bad apps might sell or use against you.
You should always be careful when downloading third-party apps from the Internet. Especially if you plan to grant those apps access to your private data.
Conduct your own research to ensure apps are well-reviewed before you install them. We’ve selected our favorite two apps below—one free option and one premium option—but you should do your own research as well.
Using Finder to Find and Delete Duplicate Mac Files
If you would rather avoid installing a third-party app, use Finder to find and delete duplicate Mac files instead. This method is incredibly time-consuming and can lead to more mistakes, but it doesn’t risk your security.
Using Finder involves looking at every file on your Mac to spot duplicates yourself. The easiest way to do this is by creating a Smart Folder which lets you sort every file by name. Then look over the names to find any exact copies.
When you find two files with duplicate names, highlight each of them and press Space to preview them. Make sure the content of each file is identical before moving any duplicates to the Trash.
dupeGuru: Find and Delete Duplicate Mac Files for Free
This cross-platform app is totally free and open source. You can use dupeGuru to find duplicate files, songs, and pictures on your Mac in minutes.
How to Install dupeGuru on Your Mac
dupeGuru works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. To install it on your Mac, download the OS X version directly from the dupeGuru website.
Download:dupeGuru (Free)
When the download finishes, drag dupeGuru to your Applications folder to complete the installation. If a warning message doesn’t let you open dupeGuru, control-click the app and select Open from that menu instead.
How to Use dupeGuru to Find Duplicate Mac Files
After opening dupeGuru, choose an Application Mode, depending on the type of files you hope to find:
Use Standard if you’re looking for duplicate files or folders on your Mac.
Choose your Scan Type from the drop-down menu below. The particular options in this menu change depending on your Application Mode, but for most purposes, you should use Contents.
Finally, click the + (Plus) button in the bottom-left corner to add the folder, or folders, you want to scan for duplicates.
We suggest you choose the Home folder to scan, which you can select using the shortcut Cmd + Shift + H. Although you might scan any folder you like.
Be careful deleting files from the System or Library folders, since you can damage the operating system on your Mac.
Finally, click Scan to find duplicate files in your selected folders. You may need to Allow dupeGuru access to various folders to complete the scan.
How to Use dupeGuru to Delete Duplicate Mac Files
After dupeGuru finishes its scan, you should see a list of all the duplicate files on your Mac. dupeGuru automatically marks the newer or higher-quality copies in blue. These are called your reference files and don’t get deleted.
Before going any further, take a few minutes to review the duplicate files.
Check the filename, file path, and file size for each duplicate in the list of results. You might also want to highlight a particular result and click the Eye icon to preview it—that way you can be certain it’s truly a duplicate before deleting the file.
If you’re unhappy with dupeGuru’s choice, you can control-click and select Make Selected into Reference to change the file you want to keep.
After reviewing the results, click the Cog icon to see options for deleting your duplicate files. If you’re happy to remove the selected copies in dupeGuru, choose to Send Marked to Trash.
Gemini: A Small Price to Pay for a Sleek User Interface
If you’re after a more polished finish, look no further than Gemini 2: The Duplicate Finder. This premium app is developed by MacPaw, the creators of other useful utilities, such as CleanMyMac X.
Gemini 2 presents a sleek interface that makes it easy to find and manage duplicate files, photos, or songs on your Mac. It costs $19.95 for a year subscription, but you can also take advantage of the three-day free trial.
How to Download Gemini on your Mac
You can download Gemini directly through the MacPaw website or through the Mac App Store. After downloading and opening the app, it prompts you to sign up for a subscription or a one-time fee.
If you agree to the fee, you can still take advantage of the three-day free trial. But you need to make sure you cancel your subscription one day before the trial ends if you don’t want to get charged.
Download:Gemini 2 ($19.95/year)
How to Use Gemini to Find Duplicate Mac Files
After opening Gemini, click the large + (Plus) icon in the middle of the window to begin scanning for duplicate files on your Mac. You can choose to scan in three default locations—Home, Music, or Pictures—or choose a custom folder instead.
After you pick your folder, click Scan for Duplicates and grant Gemini the permission it needs to access your data. It may take several minutes for the scan to complete, depending on the size of the search.
How to Use Gemini to Delete Duplicate Mac Files
After Gemini finishes scanning your Mac, it shows an overview of your duplicate files. This overview tells you how many duplicates Gemini found along with how much space they take up.
Choose to remove your duplicates automatically using Smart Cleanup or click Review Results to look at all the duplicate files in detail.
From here, you can use the sidebar to filter the results by filetype or similarity. Then look at your duplicate files in the main window. You can preview each file and look at its location before selecting the ones you want to delete.
When you’re happy with the selection, click Smart Cleanup or Remove in the bottom-right corner to delete your duplicates. Don’t worry, you can always undo this action again if you make a mistake.
Find Other Ways to Create Free Space
Iphone jailbreak software for mac. Using the apps we’ve mentioned in this post, you shouldn’t have any problem finding and deleting all the duplicate files on your Mac. Hopefully, it helped to speed up your machine and clear out some free storage.
But if your Mac is already too full, you might find it’s even not possible to delete files anymore. If that happens to you, here are all the ways to fix if your Mac startup disk is too full.
Dan is a freelance writer based in South West England.
He spent two years supervising repairs as a Genius Admin for Apple Retail and uses that knowledge to keep our troubleshooting guides up to date.
Long before that, Dan turned to Apple products from a musical background. Having owned iPods for years, he bought a MacBook to learn sound recording and production. It was using those skills that he gained a first-class Bachelor of Science in Sound Technology.
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Finding duplicate files on your Mac takes either superhuman patience, or a 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.
So, here’s how you can find and delete duplicate files on Mac:
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, just 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 on Mac
Over time your Mac is going to fill up and run out of storage space. And most likely, it will fill up with duplicates that take up all of your valuable space. Sure, you can try to sort through all of your files, searching for those duplicate documents, photos, and music files. But if you’re already at the point of your hard drive being full, that means you’ve got a lot of files to sift through. And it’s going to take you a very long time to go through them one-by-one.
Get rid of duplicate files and folders using Gemini 2
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:
When the scan is over (which doesn’t take long), you get two options: Review Results and Smart Cleanup.
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.
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:
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.
Sometimes files won’t be flagged as duplicates because they have slightly different file names. But every file has what’s called an md5 hash, which is a unique identifier that stays with the file. So even if you move or rename a file, it’s md5 hash will remain the same.
Similar to the Terminal command above, you can generate a list that shows the md5 tag to verify all of the duplicates in a particular folder. Follow the steps below to create that list.
This generates a list of all of the files in the folder you’ve specified, but you’ll at least be able to see the md5 tags to know which files are copies of each other.
How to find duplicates on Mac manually
The truth is duplicate files can live anywhere on your hard drive, which makes finding them that much trickier. But thanks to a feature in Finder called Smart Folders, you can narrow your search down based on specific criteria. Say you want to search all of the documents on your Mac, then you’d follow these steps:
While using Smart Folders is a lot faster than hunting through your entire hard drive for duplicate files, it still requires a bit of patience. Manually going through each of your files one-by-one can take some time, even after you’ve narrowed them down.
Find duplicate files in specific folders in Finder
You can also use Smart Folders to look for duplicates within specific folders. This is particularly helpful in instances when you have multiple folders in a folder. To set up a Smart Folder that searches a specific folder:
Find duplicates of specific file types in Finder
Because you change the search criteria with each Smart Folder, that means you can search for specific types of files or files of a certain size. To create a Smart Folder for a certain type of file, like pictures, you can open a new Finder window and follow these steps:
Find duplicates by file sizes in Finder
If you want to only search for files by their size, which is particularly helpful to get rid of larger duplicates, do the following:
Find duplicate pictures in your Photos library
You move a bunch of new photos onto your Mac, import them into Photos, and start sorting them out. 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:
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:
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.
How to find duplicates in 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.
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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:
Best Duplicate File Finder Mac
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.
Find Duplicate Files Mac Os
Smart Folders are a great way to search by file name or file type across your entire Mac or even within specific folders. This feature helps you organize and view your files so you can more easily spot duplicates, but it’s not without its flaws. You’re still left to delete files manually, which leaves room for errors, and that’s not to mention just how painstakingly slow it can be to delete files one at a time.
Free App To Find Duplicate Files Mac Os
Your other option for finding and deleting duplicates is to use the app, Gemini 2. It will quickly scan your entire hard drive or individual folders, presenting you with the duplicate files to review. Or you can even choose to use the Smart Cleanup feature, which will automatically delete duplicates and leave the original files in their place. It really can’t get any easier than that.
Mac App To Find Duplicate Files
Hopefully, this article helps you clean up your Mac and remove those sneaky duplicate files that are eating up all of your storage space. Best software for vocal recording mac.
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