Having many duplicate photos on your Windows 11 PC can be a problem, which can make it harder to organize photos and take up storage space. And getting rid of them can be a challenge, which can take a lot of time and patience. The good news is that it’s actually an easy and quick thing to do. This article shows you how to find and delete duplicate photos on Windows 11 PC easily and quickly. Step-by-step instructions are provided.
A set of duplicate photos is two or more photos that are exactly the same (regardless of file name), which may be created by repeated imports or backups, copying and pasting photos, etc. There are also non-exact duplicate photos, which look the same but are different in resolutions, file sizes or formats. In addition, there are similar photos.
Cisdem Duplicate Finder
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Included in the Windows operating system since Windows 8, the Microsoft Photos app, or simply the Photos app, is an app to view and organize photos (and videos). With the release of Windows 11, Microsoft released a new and redesigned Photos app. And the old one has been referred to as Photos Legacy since then.
Below I’d like to talk a bit about the Photos app for Windows 11, which helps better understand handling the duplicate photos in this app.
The Photos app supports photos from various sources: local folders (such as the Pictures folder), external devices, OneDrive, and iCloud Photos. You can see the added source(s) in the navigation bar on the left.
This app does have duplicate detection, which, however, doesn’t do a good job of detecting duplicate photos. It finds duplicates only by file name and size. If two duplicate photos have different file names, this app will consider them two unique photos.
Microsoft Photos itself only detects and hides duplicates and can’t remove duplicates. Suppose that it finds a set of duplicates in the Pictures folder. When in the All Photos view, it will display only one of the photos of this set. It will still display all photos of this set when not in the All Photos view.
In summary, the Photos app for Windows 11 makes an effort to detect duplicates and hide them to prevent the same photo from being displayed twice or more, but can’t find many (if not most) duplicate photos. That’s why we still need to do the detection with duplicate photo finder software or by hand.
Below is how to manually find duplicate photos in Microsoft Photos on a Windows 11 PC and remove them.
1. On your Windows 11 computer, open the Photos app.
2. To find duplicates in a source, like the Pictures folder, choose the source in the navigation bar.
3. Click the Sort icon and choose Name, Date taken or Date created.
4. Click the View icon and choose River and Small.
5. Find duplicate photos by comparing the content.
6. Select the unwanted duplicates, then click the Delete icon. Confirm the deletion.
The deleted duplicate photos will go to the Recycle Bin.
In step 3, there are four sort orders available. Choosing Name or Date taken is more likely to sort photos in a way that sets of duplicate photos are displayed side by side, making it very easy to spot duplicates.
To find duplicates across all the added sources, in step 2, choose All Photos in the navigation bar.
Tip: To help you better compare photos for the identification of duplicates, here’s a tip. In step 5, double-click a photo to open it in a new window. There, click the Info icon in the toolbar at the top. And you will be able to view the photo full size and see photo information, such as resolutions, file size, name, path and camera settings. You can navigate through other photos by clicking the Previous icon or Next icon.
You can get rid of images on your Windows 11 computer using File Explorer. But the process can be time-consuming. Just imagine the situation where you go through thousands of files to find the dozens of duplicate photos in them.
Here’s the good news. You can use Advanced Query Syntax (AQS) and some tools in File Explorer to help make the process of identifying duplicate photos quicker and easier.
This method can work with This PC (not recommended), a drive, or a folder (recommended).
Below are the steps.
1. In File Explorer on your PC, open the folder in which you want to find duplicate pictures.
2. In the search box in the top right corner, enter the AQS syntax “kind:=picture”, which will display all the images in this folder, including those in subfolders.
If you want to ignore small-sized duplicate photos, enter “kind:=picture size:medium” instead. This will display all the medium- or large-sized images in this folder.
3. In the toolbar at the top of the File Explorer window, choose Sort > Name or Sort > More > Size (or Date taken).
4. In the toolbar, choose View > Large icons (or Extra large icons), then choose Show > Details pane.
5. Identify duplicate images by comparing photo content and details.
6. Select the duplicates that you don’t want to keep, then click the Delete icon in the toolbar.
The deleted photos will be moved to the Recycle Bin.
In step 2, if you want, you can use AQS to further narrow your search results, for example, by specifying the date or date range.
In step 3, there are a dozen of sort orders available. You can try several orders and choose the one that works best to make it easier for you to spot duplicate photos.
The methods above are not efficient enough if there are tons of photos to go through. The good news is that there is a quick, easy and effective method available.
Cisdem Duplicate Finder can find duplicate images, videos, audios, documents and all other duplicate files on Windows 11 computer, external storage devices (such as an external hard drive, SD card or USB drive), and some cloud storage services (such as OneDrive and Amazon Photos). It can find duplicate files in and across locations.
In addition to exactly identical photos (regardless of file name), it identifies non-exact duplicates and similar photos, helping you effortlessly pick the best shots to keep and get rid of the unnecessary ones.
Below are the steps.
On your Windows 11 PC, download and install Cisdem Duplicate Finder. Open the software.
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
To find duplicate photos in a location, like a folder or drive such as Disk (D:), add it using drag and drop.
To find duplicate photos in and across multiple locations, add these locations.
It is generally not recommended to scan your entire computer for duplicate files because this will find the duplicates in system folders like C:\Windows and C:\Program Files. It is not safe to delete duplicate images and other duplicate files in system folders. If you really want to scan the entire PC, please exclude the important folders and files like system folders and backup folders.
Click the Settings icon in the top right corner. In Settings, you can exclude files and folders from scanning by specifying the path, file size range, or extension, and do more.
To find non-exact duplicates and similar photos, please make sure the Enable similar images function checkbox is selected.
Click OK to save your settings.
Click Scan, and the software will start scanning.
Once the scan is complete, the results window will appear. It has several tabs. The Images tab displays all the duplicate images that have been found. The Similar Images tab displays non-exact duplicates and similar images. The All tab displays all duplicate files. You can easily preview them side by side.
In each set of duplicate files, the software has already automatically selected all but one file for deletion. You can also select by hand.
In addition, there are selection rules available. On the left, choose the sets that you want to apply a selection rule to, then click the List icon to choose a rule.
Click the Delete button in the bottom right corner to delete the selected files all at once. Confirm the deletion.
The deleted files go to the Recycle Bin.
Tip: This tip shows you how to use this method to handle the duplicates in Microsoft Photos. First, find out the source(s) in which the duplicates exist. This method supports OneDrive as well as folders. Next, add the source(s) to scan. The rest of the process is the same. Once duplicates in the source are eliminated, they will disappear in the Photos app.
To make digital photo collections well organized and nice to view, it’s a good idea to clean up duplicate pictures a regular basis. This article shows you three ways to find and delete duplicate photos in Windows 11. The first two methods are built in to Windows and free to use. You can try them if there aren’t many photos on your computer. The third method is the most efficient and effective.
Rosa has worked in Mac software industry for more than eight years. She believes that the purpose of software is to make life better and work more productively. In addition to writing, Rosa is also an avid runner.
