Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder Review: Is It Any Good?

If you are looking for a duplicate photo finder, you may have heard about Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder. Is it safe? Does it do a good job of finding and deleting duplicate photos? Is it the most suitable tool for you or your photo collection? You can find answers in this comprehensive and unbiased review of Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder.

 Cisdem Duplicate Finder

Safely Remove Duplicate Photos All at Once

• Accurately identify duplicate photos and other duplicate files, regardless of names
• Intelligently detect similar images using on-device AI (100% offline)
• Find duplicate files on Windows PC, Mac, external storage devices, and OneDrive & Dropbox (direct online scanning)
• Let you preview duplicate photos side by side
• Automatically select all but one file for deletion in each set of duplicates, enabling you to delete all duplicates at once
• Offer rules for mass selections based on file name, time, folder, photo quality, and more
• Allow you to select or deselect files manually
• Move deleted duplicates to Recycle Bin (or Trash) for easy recovery
• Easy to use for everyone

Free Download Windows 10 or later Free Download macOS 10.11 or later GET IT ON Google Play Download on the App Store

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder review

What is Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder? It is a free duplicate photo finder app that helps Windows users get rid of photos that are identical or look similar.

My personal take

If you don't have many photos, Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder can be a good choice. It's easy to use with a great preview feature. The process of manually deleting duplicates found by it wouldn't be very time-consuming.

If you have a large photo collection, work with various image formats including RAW ones, and need features like fast scanning and bulk deletion based on factors such as file name, folder, and photo quality, you need a more powerful tool.

Is Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder safe?

The short answer is yes. Let’s take a closer look below.

Is Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder safe to download and install? Yes. It’s not malware and doesn’t contain adware, spyware or anything of such nature. The installer is clean, and the installation process is straightforward and transparent. The interface is clean and doesn’t display suspicious dialogs or pop-ups. It doesn’t make changes to your system settings. In addition, like any legitimate app, this app is easy to uninstall.

Is it safe to use? Yes. It doesn’t delete any of your files without your permission. The deleted photos go to the Recycle Bin, which means you can easily restore them if needed. This ensures the safety of your files.

Download and installation

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder can be used for Windows users. You can download it from its website. And the app is small to download. If you download the app, click it to open it. And it has instructions to help you install it. The app has a portable version as well.

Features and performance

Find duplicate photos

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder can find duplicate photos in six formats: JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, and CR2 (a RAW format used by Canon cameras).

• Usually enough for casual users.
• Photographers and photo enthusiasts may need an alternative with support for a wide range of image formats, including various camera RAW formats.

In the test, this app took 1 minute and 9 seconds to scan 1495 photos for duplicates. It’s not very fast, but the speed is acceptable. It does a decent job of identifying photos that are exactly the same.

You can add one or multiple folders to scan at a time and choose to include or exclude subfolders. When a scan is complete, it lists and groups found duplicates. However, if three or more photos are exactly identical, they will be split into more than two sets, with the format of “original and duplicate 1” and “original and duplicate 2”, which may not be that neat. Selecting a set will display two medium-sized previews side by side for easy comparison.

Find similar photos

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder can also find photos that look similar. If you don't care about similar photos and want a faster scan, you can just turn on Search Only 100% Identical Pictures in Settings. Note that you can't customize how similar photos need to be to be considered similar.

According to the tests, it can find certain similar photos taken by cameras and certain slightly edited photos (e.g., cropped or color-adjusted versions). 

When this app finishes finding them, it will display them for you to preview and also show the similarity level to tell you how similar a pair of photos is. For duplicate photos, the similarity level shown is 100%.

Remove duplicates

The removal of unwanted duplicates and similar photos is manual. There isn’t a feature or option to help you automate the process. Also, there isn’t a way for you to delete multiple duplicates at a time. You need to deal with every set of photos by hand.

If there are tons of items to remove, the process can be time and patience consuming. And in such a case, an app that offers various selection rules to enable bulk removal can be a more efficient choice.

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder provides two removal methods: moving duplicates to the Recycle Bin (default) or moving them to a folder of your choice. If your purpose is to get rid of duplicates and also free up storage space, choose the former and then permanently delete them in the Recycle Bin.

How to use Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder

Step 1. Download and install Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder. Open it.

Step 2. Drag the folder(s) from which you want to remove duplicate photos into the You can drag directories area. Alternatively, you can use the Add icon to add the folder(s).

Step 3. Click Start Search. Note that there’s a Scan Subdirectories checkbox. If you want to find duplicates in subfolders, select this checkbox.

Step 4. When the scan is complete, an Information message box will appear, showing you how many duplicates have been found. Click OK to close the box.

Step 5. In the scan results section at the bottom, select a set of duplicate files by clicking it, and the previews will appear, allowing you to easily view photos and see photo information (including the format, resolution and file size). After you decide which photo to remove, click the trash icon below the preview to move it to the Recycle Bin or click the folder icon to move it to a particular folder.

Note that you can sort the scan results by the similarity level or the file path.

Step 6. Continue handling other duplicate photos one by one.

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder alternatives

If Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder doesn’t meet your needs or you are a Mac user, you can check out its alternatives below.

Cisdem Duplicate Finder (Windows & Mac)

While Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is suitable for many users with a small number of photos, Cisdem Duplicate Finder is suitable for both small and large photo collections, including those from professional photographers.

It supports a wide variety of image formats, including RAW formats, and uses hashing to quickly compare photos by content. It can scan 10 GB of files for duplicates in less than 20 seconds. It also detects similar photos.

With features like automatic selection and selection rules based on factors such as file name, time, and folder, this alternative makes the removal process easy, quick, and reliable, making it far more efficient than Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder. It also offers a selection rule based on photo quality scoring (powered by on-device AI), helping you keep the best version of similar photos.

Free Download Windows 10 or later Free Download macOS 10.11 or later

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder (Windows)

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder used to be a completely free app like Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder. Now it has a free version and a paid version.

In addition to photos, this app supports other common file types, such as audio, videos, and archives. The scan can be processed quite fast. The preview feature is not as convenient as Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder's, but the deletion feature is more efficient due to bulk process. Note that you need to use the paid version if you want to fully use the deletion feature.

Anti-Twin (Windows)

Anti-Twin is completely free to use and resembles Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder in some ways. Note that the app has not been updated for over a decade and might have compatibility issues. (It works properly on my Windows 11 PC.)

Anti-Twin is capable of finding identical and similar photos just like the Awesome app, but make sure you select the right comparison method: choosing Byte by Byte to find duplicates and Compare images (pixels) for similar photo detection.

Anti-Twin can be more efficient than Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder in terms of removal, since it offers a tool to help users bulk select duplicates for deletion, although this tool may be confusing to beginners (requiring a learning curve and some testing).