A German digital agency keeps decades of creative assets under control - scanning Windows PCs, USB drives, and Dropbox in one workflow.
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Based near Freiburg, Germany, mylapo is a digital agency that combines creative services with IT expertise to help businesses develop their websites, brand identities, and digital presence.
The agency offers web design, graphic design, photography and video production, marketing, Microsoft 365, and managed IT services. With more than 70 clients and over 300 websites created, the team works on a diverse range of projects across different industries.
For the design department, photographs and videos are working assets - and keeping them organized across computers, USB drives, and cloud storage is an ongoing part of managing digital project materials.
Before adopting Cisdem Duplicate Finder, mylapo’s creative and technical teams faced an escalating storage bottleneck. Other cleaning utilities could report file counts and byte sizes - but could not tell whether two visually identical images differed merely by compression ratio, resolution, or format. Key operational challenges included:
Over years of rapid growth and more than 300 client website launches, TBs of high-resolution RAW photos and 4K footage accumulated across Windows workstations, portable SSDs, and Dropbox accounts. Redundant copies piled up uncontrollably, putting extreme pressure on storage capacity.
Comparing photo bursts and duplicate takes by hand took hours and often entire days, taking key personnel away from active client deliverables.
Standard utilities lacked directory-tree preview and side-by-side inspection, making mass deletion dangerously prone to deleting high-res camera originals.
Cleaning Dropbox previously required downloading hundreds of gigabytes locally first, congesting local SSDs and internet bandwidth.
Our design department transfers photos back and forth from Windows, Dropbox, external HDs, and SD cards. In between all of this, so many redundant files are created unintentionally. This builds up quickly over time with TBs of stuff over the decades... It got so overwhelming that it literally takes hours and hours even DAYS just to sort through images.
Facing storage that kept growing and cleanup time that kept getting longer, the team went looking for a duplicate finder that could keep up.
mylapo adopted Cisdem Duplicate Finder for Windows to replace rigid hash-only utilities. The impact was felt on day one. Rather than treating duplicate management as a blind command-line sweep, Cisdem connected local storage, removable drives, and cloud storage into a single, visual interface.
We have purchased several duplicate finder apps for Windows over the years, ranging anywhere from $9.99 to well over $100, and this one blows them all away. We all like the side-by-side comparison interface, and before you remove duplicates, it gives you one final review that clearly shows the directory structure and AI suggestions on which file to keep. The workflow is fast, intuitive, and incredibly efficient.
Cisdem Duplicate Finder identifies duplicates by comparing file contents rather than relying on filenames, and it can scan computers, external storage and cloud drives in the same pass. For mylapo’s design team, three capabilities do the heavy lifting.
Images and video are the team’s primary material. Whether assets sit in working folders or have been archived for later use, copies accumulate as projects progress.
The app scans the locations you choose and surfaces the duplicates, so redundant copies can be reviewed in bulk instead of compared one file at a time.
Cloud storage collects duplicates just as reliably as a local drive does. With the Cloud File Scan feature, the team authorises access to Dropbox and picks either the whole account or specific folders.
Results come back inside the app - so Dropbox clutter gets cleaned up without downloading the entire account first.
Instead of treating each drive as its own cleanup project, the team points one search across a Windows PC, USB drives, and cloud storage to catch duplicates wherever they hide.
Finding duplicates is only the first step
Finding duplicates is only half the job; the other half is being confident about what to keep. Before removal, the app shows the detected matches with the directory structure and an AI suggestion for which file to retain. Selection rules let the team auto-pick by folder priority, time, or resolution - and override anything the rules get wrong.
Point the app at a folder, a drive, a Dropbox account - or all of them at once.
In professional creative studios, automated deletions cannot be a black box. Cisdem provides a clear side-by-side visual viewer alongside an interactive directory tree preview. Before committing to deletion, users see the exact directory path, file size, and timestamp of every file, making accidental deletions impossible.
Adjust the selection by folder priority, time or resolution, or check the AI suggestion for which file to keep. Then remove the confirmed duplicates in batches.
It does a pretty good job of finding visually similar photos, even across different formats, compression ratios and resolutions. I use the settings to define the degree of similarity - somewhere between 80 and 90% gets me excellent results. And I especially like select by folder priority, time and resolution: if some images were originals and others were copies that got synced or edited, the time rule auto-selects the older or newer ones for me.
Since utilizing Cisdem Duplicate Finder into their creative IT operations, mylapo has:
Implementing Cisdem Duplicate Finder transformed file maintenance at mylapo from an anxiety-inducing chore into a seamless, automated operational standard.
Cisdem Duplicate Finder is so straightforward, clearing out almost 400 GBs on our 14TB drive, I could have never gone through all of the duplicates it found. Luckily, it has AI models running locally to evaluate different aspects of photo quality and generate a score for each photo. Setting the degree of similarity at 80–90% gets me excellent results, even across different formats, compression ratios, or resolutions.
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