How Alyssa Bock Cleared 38,906 Duplicate Photos and Reclaimed 98GB

I’m a former web designer based in New Orleans. When I became a mother, I also unexpectedly became a photographer.

I quit my job to stay home with my newborn daughter, and I found myself taking more photos and videos than ever - not just of her, but of our whole world.

Between developmental milestones, birthday parties, our new apartment, dozens of trips, and everyday family moments, my camera roll became a visual diary of our lives.

From the time I met my husband ten years ago, we had accumulated over 70,000 photos and 10,000 video clips. It was a priceless treasure, but keeping everything organized felt like an insurmountable mountain.

It hit me right when I tried to download a newly released app, and that dreaded warning flashed on my screen: “Insufficient Storage Space.” It forced me to stop what I was doing. I opened my iPhone settings, and I had to laugh - photos and videos were taking up over 80% of my entire phone's storage!

And it wasn’t just my phone. My MacBook Pro’s 256GB drive had plunged down to only 9GB of free space.

On our old home iMac, our 1TB drive was maxed out with a 250GB family photo library and 550GB of unlabeled video clips.

I was constantly getting “Startup Disk Full” warnings and sometimes couldn’t even save a basic text file.

I had been paying $10 every single month for a 2TB iCloud plan, but throwing more cloud storage at the problem didn’t fix the chaos.

I quit. Every time.

I’d open an album, start scrolling, tap a few photos, delete them, and then just… stop. You tell yourself you’ll do a little bit each evening.

What nobody warns you about is that every photo pulls you straight back into the moment it was taken. It's like tidying your room - every file has a story, and every story makes you wonder: keep it or let it go?

After reviewing 100 similar shots, my brain simply shuts down. I constantly ask myself: “Should I keep this? Have I see this photo before? Is this a duplicate of the other photo I just saw?”

Every photo held a memory. Every deletion felt like a decision.

And the thumbnail grid view wasn’t helping with quality checks. You’re choosing from tiny previews, so it’s hard to tell whether something is blurry, nearly identical to another shot, or actually worth keeping.

So you keep everything - just in case.

At one point, I managed to clear about 6GB manually. It took forever, and the space was gone again within a few days.

Every time I tried to clean, I’d get overwhelmed, delete like six photos, and quit. One afternoon I frantically cleaned for two hours, only to realize I had reduced my library by barely 5%. It felt like a total waste of time.

I had tried the built-in macOS storage tools and general cleanup utilities like CleanMyMac. They would clear 5GB or 10GB of temporary caches, but the disk would fill back up in a few weeks because they didn't touch the root cause: the photo graveyard.

What stood out about Cisdem was that I could scan my Apple Photos Library and regular folders in one place.

I could simply add my Photos Library or folders on my external drives, start a scan, and let it work while I did something else. and I feel safe that Cisdem scans Apple Photos libraries natively without altering or corrupting the album structure. Other tools often mess up the metadata or break my photos structure.

It also helped with more than exact duplicates. For photos that looked almost the same - like burst shots or multiple versions of the same moment - it grouped them together so I could review them as a set.

That was important to me because not every photo I wanted to remove was an exact copy.

And the selection rules made the cleanup much easier. Instead of manually selecting thousands of files, I could let Cisdem narrow down the obvious ones based on things like resolution, file size, or folder priority, then review the results before deleting anything.