From eight years of lecture recordings to a 30,000 photo library. faculty and staff at Brigham Young University use Cisdem Duplicate Finder to find duplicate files, review repeated folders, and reclaim storage - without losing the copies that matter.
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Founded in 1875, Brigham Young University (BYU) is one of the premier private research institutions in North America, educating over 35,000 students across 11 colleges. Faculty and staff build collections of lecture materials, research files, audio recordings, photos, and archived work over time.
This story focuses on experiences shared by Daryl Lee, Professor of French, and Traci Wright, Administrative Assistant. Their day-to-day file collections differ, but both describe the same friction: growing libraries become harder to search and maintain when repeated copies are scattered through folders and backups.
More files, less control
At BYU, files pile up in more places than anyone expects: research data, lecture recordings, publications and photo libraries, copied across computers, external drives, cloud storage and old backups. For individual faculty and staff, the problem is personal - finding the right file without spending hours organizing everything by hand.
For Dr. Daryl Lee, Professor of French, eight years of academic lectures, archival recordings, and iTunes music tracks had accumulated into tons of duplicates. The problem was compounded by the fact that track names weren’t identical: some had track numbers prepended, others had been ripped as WAV while an AAC copy already existed, and bitrates varied. Standard macOS searches were helpless because filenames didn’t match - and manual inspection would have meant listening to thousands of clips one by one.
I was so used to the “one file belongs in one place” computing ideology. But with so many different files and storage devices, my sorting became an exercise in frustration. For months, I used OneDrive as a secondary image library, but I still found myself doing manual folder cleanup week after week.
Meanwhile, Administrative Assistant Traci Wright was wrestling with a visual catastrophe. Over years of documenting university banquets, academic conferences, visiting scholar summits, and commencement ceremonies, her Apple Photos library had swollen past 30,000 photos. Folders had been imported and re-imported whenever staff swapped MacBooks, creating duplicate album hierarchies on top of the duplicate images themselves.
It was completely absorbing. Going through 30,000 pictures by hand would have taken weeks of eye strain, and one slip of the finger meant risking deleting an original campus history record.
Two very different collections, and the same four problems underneath. Key pain points included:
Standard macOS duplicate finders compared exact filenames and leaned on MD5 hashes. They had no support for iTunes or Apple Photos, so they stayed blind to audio files whose track numbers or bitrate tags differed but whose sound was identical.
Eye-balling 30,000 event photos or listening to thousands of lecture recordings by hand would have cost weeks of faculty and staff time - work that had nothing to do with teaching or research.
Generic Mac cleaner utilities could break Apple Photos SQLite catalogs or permanently delete master research recordings, with no safe restore path if the wrong copy went.
Duplicate research branches were synced to departmental shared servers without anyone noticing, inflating backup and storage costs across the university.
Across both collections, the question turned out to be the same: how do you tell which copy is the one worth keeping - without opening every file to find out?
After testing several generic Mac cleaners that offered superficial cache purging or caused metadata corruption inside Apple Photos libraries, BYU faculty and staff turned to Cisdem Duplicate Finder, which offers a unified, multi-algorithm scanning engine built specifically for Apple Silicon and macOS frameworks.
I’ve tried dozens of duplicate removers. None allow the amount of control you have over which duplicates get removed and which ones you keep, as this app does.
Daryl started with iTunes. The app identified songs as duplicates even when the track number and name varied, and he removed almost 1 TB of audio, including many long WAV lecture files.
I removed almost 1 TB of audio files from iTunes over the last 8 years, especially I have many long WAV lecture files.
Once audio deduplication proved effective, staff applied Cisdem to their photo libraries. Digital humanities projects, departmental events, and faculty field photography routinely generate tens of thousands of high-resolution images.
I dropped my photo library, which has around 30,000 images, into the app, and the scan completed in about 35 minutes. It showed me exact duplicates as well as similar photos. Cisdem works directly inside Apple Photos and detects duplicates even if they’re in different formats or sizes. The visually similar image detection feature is invaluable - other apps I’ve used simply don’t offer this depth of control.
Instead of brute-force deletion, Cisdem’s similar photo engine clusters images by visual content. Staff can adjust the similarity slider, view groups of similar images side by side, and make sure that slight edits or crops are preserved when they were intended.
Sometimes the duplication isn’t a handful of files - it’s entire folders that have been copied more than once: project exports, semester archives, departmental materials. Hunting those down file by file misses the bigger picture.
Cisdem has an Duplicate Folder Finder feature which shows duplicate folders together so they can be reviewed in batches. Selection rules such as “Select Oldest” make bulk review fast - then you confirm what to keep.
The app is super comprehensive, and I could use it without really reading the tutorial. I especially like the Duplicate Folder Finder function, instead of hunting down individual files, it shows entire folders, and you can set a selection rule like “Select Oldest” to bulk-select. The workflow is fast, intuitive, and super easy.
Less time managing files. More confidence in what’s kept.
The impact shows up in time saved and clutter cleared - but also in what users no longer worry about: accidentally deleting something important, or spending an afternoon comparing folders by hand.
The payoff goes beyond space: less time searching, comparing and sorting, and more time for teaching and research.
The goal isn’t to remove every repeated file at any cost. It’s to make collections easier to find, maintain and transfer. BYU users suggest starting with the collection that frustrates you most, reviewing each group, and confirming what must be kept before deleting - especially for active research or long-term archives.
This is by far the best duplicate file finder I’ve used on Mac. It’s fast, easy to run, and powerful enough to clean anything from a few gigabytes to multiple terabytes.
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