Top 9 Best Duplicate Photo Finder for Mac in 2023: Delete Duplicate Photos in Minutes

Duplicate photos are photos that are exactly identical regardless of filename. There are also near-duplicate photos, commonly known as similar photos. Unnecessary duplicates and near duplicates can clutter up your photo library and take up space on your Mac. Let’s get rid of them. The best way is to use a duplicate photo finder for Mac.

You can get rid of duplicate pictures on Mac by hand one by one, but the process can be very time-consuming. Luckily, there are apps to help Mac users quickly find and remove duplicate photos. They vary in features, performance, safety and ease of use. This article lists 8 great apps to consider and can help you pick the best duplicate photo finder for Mac.

 

Top 9 best duplicate photo finder for Mac

#1 Cisdem Duplicate Finder

Compatibility: macOS 10.11 or later

Latest version: 6.3.0, released in November 2022

Our take: Best for removing duplicate photos and other duplicate files on Mac, including duplicates in Mac Photos app

Cisdem Duplicate Finder is picked as the best Mac duplicate photo finder and remover due to its high performance, safety, ease-of-use and customizability.

The app can accurately find and safely delete the duplicate photos in Photos app and folders. Moreover, you can use it to get rid of all types of duplicate files (such as duplicate images, videos, songs, documents and archives) on your Mac, external hard drives, SD cards and cloud storage.

With advanced algorithms and support for almost all image formats (such as JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP, PSD, RAW and CR2), the app accurately and quickly finds true duplicate photos by content. It also identifies similar photos, grouping them together for you to easily pick the best shots to keep.

Designed to support Apple Photos for Mac, Cisdem Duplicate Finder scans your Photos for duplicates, displays the scan results, auto-selects duplicates for deletion, and lets you bulk delete selected duplicates by moving them to Recently Deleted in Photos app. It performs the task reliably, like a human would do, but far more efficiently.

Its smart auto-select feature decides for you which ones to keep and which ones to remove, selecting all but one photo in each group of duplicate photos for removal. Also, it provides selection rules to help you easily mass select. Or, you can select by hand.

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#2 Easy Duplicate Finder

Compatibility: macOS 10.8 or later

Latest version: 7.24.0.43, released in March 2023

Our take: Good for eliminating duplicate files including duplicate photos in Mac’s folders

In addition to the best duplicate photo finder for Mac recommended above, there are other choices to check out.

This duplicate file finder is smart enough to detect duplicate files by content instead of filename. It can help users remove photo duplicates from folders on MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and iMac etc. With support for all popular image formats, it finds duplicate JPG photos, duplicate PNG photos and so on.

Easy Duplicate Finder offers three general modes to compare pictures and other files on your Mac to identify duplicates: a combination of hash comparison and size comparison (recommended), byte-by-byte comparison, and filename comparison. Once it finishes identifying, its Auto Remove feature can automatically eliminate duplicates in bulk. But the Manual Review feature is more reliable, letting you view and examine the found duplicate photos.

#3 Gemini 2

Compatibility: macOS 10.10 or later

Latest version: 2.9.8, released in March 2023

Our take: The best-looking duplicate photo finder for Mac with useful features to deal with duplicate photos

With a beautiful interface and useful features, Gemini 2 helps users locate the duplicate photos on their Macs and makes it easy to get rid of the located duplicates. In addition to photo files, it supports other common file types.

Designed to be simple, the app is easy to use. After it finishes finding duplicate photos, you can easily review them in the results window. There, duplicates are displayed in groups. To offer a good user experience, it lets you sort duplicates by size or filename.

You can go through each group and select the unwanted duplicates for removal. To avoid manual selecting, you can use the Select Duplicates feature, which offers four selection rules. Once you apply a rule, this app will automatically select duplicates for deletion based on the rule.

#4 PhotoSweeper

Compatibility: macOS 10.13 or later

Latest version: 4.7.1, released in January 2023

Our take: A dedicated duplicate photo finder for Mac with support for Lightroom

Designed to handle image files only, PhotoSweeper fully supports all popular image formats, including a few raw image formats. The support for raw photos can be a benefit for photographers particularly.

This app is capable of finding all the duplicate photos in folders you choose. It can also scan a location on your Mac for similar photos. Letting you decide what to find, it provides three sets of settings for comparing photos. With different settings, the algorithm and method used to find duplicate photos and similar ones can be different, so can be the speed and results.

If you want a quick comparison, there could be false positives. If you set PhotoSweeper to find duplicate photos in a more accurate manner, the speed will be low.

If the app crashes or freezes when scanning a large photo library or folder, don’t worry. Quit or force quit the app. Relaunch it and perform the scan again.

#5 Duplicate Photo Cleaner

Compatibility: macOS 10.8 or later

Latest version: 7.13.0.33, released in January 2023

Our take: A duplicate photo finder for Mac with multiple modes to scan for duplicate pictures

Dedicated to locating the duplicate image files on a Mac for users to bulk delete, Duplicate Photo Cleaner supports all popular image formats including some RAW formats.

Highly customizable, it allows you to scan only specific formats of images for duplicates. It also offers multiple scan modes, such as the Folder Comparison mode (which lets you easily compare two folders for duplicate photos). You have full control over what duplicates to find and where to find.

When it finishes scanning, it will display duplicates in groups for you to view. But note that sometimes there can be something wrong with the displaying. In the test, it displayed four identical images into two groups instead of one group.

In addition to identical photos, it can help you find photos that are nearly identical (such as visually similar photos). You can adjust the Similarity Threshold value to get more desired scan results.

#6 Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro

Compatibility: macOS 10.8 or later

Latest version: 4.7, released in January 2023

Our take: Equipped with two customizable modes to find duplicate photos and similar photos on Mac

Lightweight and compact, it’s one of the best duplicate photo finders available for Mac users. It offers two modes.

To look for duplicate images only, enable the Exact Match mode.

To find both duplicate images and similar ones, switch to the Similar Matches mode, which lets you compare images by content, size and metadata (such as time and location). The Similar Matches mode, for example, allows you to find burst mode photos (which can look very similar). It addition, it can find the rotated or flipped version(s) of the same photo.

Before a scan, you can configure settings in Preferences. For example, you can go to the Filter & Sort tab to exclude certain images from scan by file size or image format.

#7 Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto (free)

Compatibility: macOS 10.7 or later

Latest version: 1.29, released in September 2022

Our take: A free app that can find most of the duplicate photos on your Mac

If you are looking for the best free duplicate photo finder for Mac, you can check out Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto. Don’t let the app’s name fool you. In addition to iPhoto, it can find and delete duplicate pictures in folders and the Photos app.

In the test, this app took more than one minute to search for duplicates, where most other apps only took several seconds. I used this app to scan a folder where 62 groups of duplicate photos existed, and it found 60 groups, which is pretty acceptable.

Despite being freeware, this app provides a great preview feature and a useful Auto Mark feature. If you don’t want to spend time manually selecting individual duplicates to delete, just click the Auto Mark button.

#8 dupeGuru for Mac (free)

Compatibility: macOS 10.12 or later

Latest version: 4.3.1, released in July 2022

Our take: The best duplicate photo finder Mac free app that is open source

dupeGuru has been around since 2004. Users needed to pay to use it until 2010 when the developer Hardcoded Software announced that its apps became free and open source.

It used to offer the Picture Edition and the Music Edition. And later the functionalities from the two editions were packed in one app.

Now dupeGuru offers three scan modes: Standard, Music and Picture. To use dupeGuru to locate and eliminate duplicate images on Mac, you can use the Standard mode or the Picture mode. To my surprise, the former is actually better according to the tests.

In the tests, the Standard mode found more duplicate photos and was fast. The Picture mode missed several groups of duplicates and was three times slower.

But you need to use the Picture mode if you want to find similar photos on Mac. The tests show that dupeGuru is likely to successfully find extremely similar photos. When it comes to finding other similar photos, the performance is not good.

#9 macOS Ventura Photos (free)

Compatibility: macOS 13

Our take: A built-in way to detect duplicate photos on Macs that run macOS Ventura

I hate to make this list any longer, but I have to add this to the list, because macOS Ventura users may find it useful.

If your Mac is running macOS Ventura or is compatible with it, you can use the duplicate photo finder built-in to the Photos app. After finding duplicates in your Photos library, Photos app’s duplicate detection feature display them in the Duplicates album.

This feature works automatically. If the Duplicates album doesn’t appear in your Photos app, it means that there aren’t any duplicate in your library.

You can either manually delete the redundant duplicates or use this feature’s Merge tool to automatically merge duplicate photos. Before you take any action, make sure that you take a look at the detected duplicates.

Comparison of duplicate photo finders for Mac

Above are the reviews of the Mac duplicate photo finder apps. Here is a comparison of the apps.

FAQs

1. What are duplicate photos?

Strictly speaking, they are photos that are exactly the same in every way regardless of filename.

There are also visually identical photos in different sizes or formats and visually similar photos, such as pictures captured in burst mode and slightly edited photos etc. Some people refer to them as near-duplicate photos, commonly called similar photos.

2. Why are there duplicate photos on my Mac?

They can be created when you import or download the same photos twice or more, or when you copy (instead of cut) and paste photos. You can have similar photos if you use burst mode when shooting, or if you edit or compress photos a lot.

Also sometimes Mac’s Photos app can duplicate photos when importing, causing you to have JPEG versions and HEIC versions of the same photos.

3. Does Mac Photos recognize duplicates?

The Photos app on Mac is where Mac users usually store and manage their photos. It is also where duplicate photos often reside on a Mac. Mac’s Photos can detect duplicates when you import photos, preventing duplicate photos from being imported. The Photos app in macOS Monterey or earlier can’t recognize the duplicates that already exist, but it can since macOS Ventura 13.

4. How do you delete duplicate photos on Mac?

There is a manual way. In Finder on Mac, open a folder with photos, sort them by name or size and then manually identify the duplicates for deletion.

To effortlessly get the job done, you need a duplicate photo finder for Mac.

5. What makes a good photo duplicate finder for Mac?

There are five criteria to consider.

Ability to find true duplicates photos: It should identify duplicate photos based on content instead of filename (only).

Support for Apple Photos: To deal with the duplicates in Photos app, you should use a duplicate photo finder safely designed for Photos.

Preview feature: A preview feature is necessary so that you can conveniently view the duplicate pictures you are handling and deleting.

Safe removal: It should show warning before deleting and take measures to prevent or restore an accidental deletion.

Ease of use: It should offer a good balance between features and ease of use.

6. What is the best photo duplicate finder for Mac?

With these basic criteria in mind, we tested over a dozen of popular apps for duplicate image removal and picked the top ones. Based on tests and reviews, Cisdem Duplicate Finder is the best. Both beginners and advanced users can use it to easily and effectively get rid of duplicate photos on MacBook Air, MacBook Pro or iMac etc.

Conclusion

Duplicate photos are common. No matter the cause, the best practice is to get rid of them. This article lists 8 highly rated apps, including paid ones and free ones. They are designed to help you quickly and effortlessly find duplicate photos on Mac and remove unwanted copies.

I hope the article can help you pick the best duplicate photo finder for Mac. Your duplicate-free photo collection will become easier to browse and manage. Also, deduplication can help free up a lot of space on Mac.