This post is sponsored by Systweak Software, maker of Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro.
There was a time when people could keep track of their photos with a few shoeboxes in the closet. Now we live in the digital age where an average person will take thousands of photos each year — that’s a lot of shoeboxes.
Digital photography uses a lot less paper, but it still creates a big mess. Maybe that explains why Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro is currently ranked No. 7 on Apple’s list of the top 10 paid downloads in the Mac App Store. Its popularity speaks to just how common the problem of unwanted duplicate photos is.
Many of us use our computers as a kind of digital junk drawer that’s gigabytes deep. Clearing out doubled (or tripled or quadrupled) photos can save vast amounts of disk space, but after long enough the challenge of finding these extraneous images becomes nearly impossible without some help.
The vast majority of pictures get thrown straight into our personal computers, whether dragged from our mobile devices or downloaded from the internet, then get copied and spread around by this or that application into countless folders we might not even know exist.
Hence Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro, which basically offers an X-ray of the complex of photo folders on your computer, quickly rooting out the fugitive photos hiding in unseen corners of your hard drive and presenting the copies it finds side-by-side to make it a breeze to decide which ones get the boot.
The interface is a simple drag-and-drop affair, scanning any given folder and presenting tabs for adding the iPhoto and Photo app (newly added) libraries to the search.
Searches can be filtered and fine-tuned via simple sliders and other parameters to seek out exact photo file copies or groups of images that look similar. The latter is useful for revealing things like the strings of photos that often occur when taking bursts of photos in an attempt to get a family portrait where nobody’s blinking. Depending on Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro’s settings, a set of duplicate images will show up with all but one already checked off, meaning a quick visual check is all that’s needed before you can clear out unwanted extras.
Delete dupes to free up valuable disk space
It’s not just about photos you took, either. It’s all too easy for even the most organized of users to accrue images that invisibly eat up valuable disk space.
Maybe the unwanted files got created by a video- or slideshow-editing program. Or maybe hundreds of JPEGs are building up like plaque in your downloads folder, unbeknownst to you.
No matter what the source of the duplicate files, the solution is available and, for the moment, cheap. Right now you can download Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro from the Mac App Store for 99 cents. The app is normally $18.99, so if you’re ready to clean out your computer’s photographic memory, now’s the time.
