A question that comes up often on the Life & Technology radio show is about the best way to cull duplicate files and photos from your devices.
It’s all too easy to hoard duplicate photos or accidentally redownload files, but what’s the best way to get rid of the extras or pick the best shot out of each set?
Removing similar or identical files can free up a lot of space on your phone, so let’s go over a few of the best options.
Google Photos’ Manage Storage (Android)
Google has an inbuilt tool that deletes backed-up photos and ensures only one copy of each file is stored in your Google Photos cloud storage.
This tool identifies photos that have already been backed up to your cloud storage and offers to delete your local copies, freeing up storage on your phone.
If you’d prefer to keep your photos locally, you’ll need to use a third-party tool like one of the ones further down in this article.
To access this tool, open your Photos app, tap the profile picture at the top right, tap “Manage Storage” and then “Free Up Space.” This will remove local photos that are already backed up in your chosen quality.
To ensure your photos are kept in high quality, you can press the Backup option in the same menu and set the quality to Original.
Apple Photos’ Duplicates album (iOS)
The iOS Photos app automatically detects duplicate photos and videos in your library, placing them in a Duplicates album that can be found in the Utilities section.
When you select to merge duplicate photos, it selects the highest-quality version while the rest are moved to the Recently Deleted album.
Merging photos on your iPhone or iPad reflects the change in iCloud as well.
To access this tool, open the Photos app, tap Collections at the bottom then scroll to Utilities and find the Duplicates section.
It’s worth noting that if your iPhone or iPad has no duplicate photos, the album won’t appear.
Slidebox (iOS & Android)
Slidebox is a photo sorting app that gives you an easy way to sort through your photo albums.
You can manually flip through your photos, swiping up to mark them for deletion, or swiping down to mark them as favourites. You can also sort photos into folders, categorising them for easy identification later.
The free version allows you access to photos from the past year, while the premium version with either a one-time purchase or subscription option provides unlimited organisation and removes ads.
It’s not the quickest way to sort photos, but it’s a fully hands on option that prevents any mistakes that AI tools might make.
If it’s the first time sorting through all your photos, it will take a good chunk of time, but once you’re on top of it you’ll only have to sort through a smaller set of photos at a time.
The Android version of the app is available on the Play Store here, while the iOS version is available on the App Store.
Cisdem Duplicate Finder (Android)
Cisdem Duplicate Finder is a cleaner tool that automatically detects visually similar images with an adjustable threshold.
You can then manually sort through the detected duplicates, picking your favourite and deleting the rest. Alternatively, you can tell the tool to pick the best quality option
Cisdem also detects duplicate audio files and documents, helping to free up space on your phone and sort through any files that you may have downloaded a few too many times.
Cisdem Duplicate Finder is available from the Android Play Store.
PhotoPicker (iOS)
PhotoPicker is an AI tool that sorts through your library and automatically categorises photos. It sorts them into five star categories, automatically detecting Closed Eyes, Blurred, Duplicate, Candidate, and AI-selected categories.
After that, you can manually go through and delete unwanted photos out of these categories, or clean up any mistakes the tool has made.
It’s an effortless way to sort through a large photo library and pick out any photos that might not meet your standards.
It also helps to group together duplicate photos so that you can pick a favourite and remove the others, saving space and reducing the time it takes to scroll through your albums.
However, it’s not foolproof – the tool categorised some photos into Closed Eyes where they were clearly open, or sorted photos with a shallow depth of field into Blurred.
Check out PhotoPicker on the App Store.
Duplicate Cleaner 5 (Windows)
Charlie’s favourite app for sorting through duplicate files on your PC is Duplicate Cleaner 5. It scans through your hard drive for identical files, images, audio, and video, marks them down and gives you the option to delete them.
You can either scan your whole PC for dupes or narrow your search by file type, folders, and more. It can even search in compressed files like .zip archives.
The tool is a great help for images, using a visual comparison technique that has an adjustable threshold. Then, you can view images side by side for comparison, helping you decide which version to keep.
Duplicate Cleaner 5 is a paid app with a 7-day trial period, but there’s a cut-down free option. You can check it out on the program’s website.
Zero Duplicates (Mac)
Zero Duplicates is a Mac app that finds and removes duplicate files safely.
It compares file content – not just file name, to comprehensively identify duplicates across your whole Mac hard drive.
It’s privacy focused, meaning your data never leaves your device.
There’s a free version available to help you test the app and clean up 1GB of space, but after that you’ll have to pay.
The app is available from the Mac App Store.
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