PhotoSweeper App Reviews

Very professional looking, great user interface, does what it says, very affordable, excellent User Manual. Seamlessly moved duplicates to the specified album in Photos so that I can just keep them around for a while. Quite fast for 37000 photos in the library. I also feel more confident buying from the Apple Store.

I am not sure how other users report such good results but I had quadruplets of photos in iPhoto that were never tags - that is using default Compare feature?? Some of the duplicates were from using iPhoto’s Enhance feature, but PhotoSweeper should have found those also. I also tried some Advance features and none of them improved the outcome. I wasted another $10 bucks …. if someone knows a product that REALLY works, please let me know.

I never leave reviews, but this application found and removed over 5,000 duplicates after my transition to iCloud Photo Library. Apple SHOULD do this without me having to buy a $10 app, but I digress...

I have a 30,000-photo library in Photos that has migrated from Windows to Mac iPhoto to Aperture to Photo’s over time. It’s a mess. On my first pass: 1431 photos were removed, saving 13.57 GB on your disk These are true duplicates… I looked at each and every one of them. Customer Service Experience: I had a problem determining how the photo selection process worked and contacted customer service with 6 questions. I was up late and wrote the email very late at night. They responded in 30 minutes. I exchanged several emails and they resolved my questions on how to optimize the search and selection of marked photos. The customer service team politely took a product improvement suggestion. A word of caution: Show filenames in the review process or you can mark/delete the wrong photo’s. Also, make sure you know what each option does before you actually mark and remove photo’s… Run it a few times and change the preferences. It will make all the world of difference on your happiness. Thanks for the great App.

6 yr old macbook pro. 500 GB drive. Always filling up with photos and videos. Started looking at all the tools to clean things up and actually downloaded and tried a few other, but found I could not trust them to delete files that were not actually duplicates. Used photo sweeper, step 1 for me delete duplicates: freed up 39 G of disk space. I spot checked a number of the dups and delete a few unimportant ones by hand to verify and felt very confident I was not deleting anything that was not really a dup. This tool has a lot of options and i think in the end it will free up another 100G of storage for me after I run with filters set a bit looser.

I’ve tried quite a few apps to find and eliminate duplicate photos, and this is by far the best. Excellent ability to recognize duplicates, which can easily be fine-tuned. Excellent ability to automatically select which photos to keep, based on many different criteria, which can be customized and prioritized. This is the one to get, in my opinion!

I have tried many dup finders over the years and actually have 5 in my applications now but after going back and forth many times between these apps I always default to Photo Sweeper as it has for me the best set up for finding and then checking over the found duplicates to insure I am not tossing the wrong one. You do have to learn to operate with the interface a little but it seemed the most intuitive to me and I quickly learned to adjust it to my needs so I could rid my self of many libraries worth of dups (iPhoto, Photos, Aperture, Lightroom ) saving me at least 100GB of HD space.

Since the most recent Lightroom update, Photosweeper no longer adds photos to a delete collection in the Lightroom catalog. Please update the application to get this feature working again, as this is what I use it mostly for.

I want to move to a new computer by the end of the year, so this seemed like a good time to cleanup my photos. My computer says I have over 600,000 jpg files, mostly in iPhoto and Photo libraries. In the past I have tried other cleanup apps, but they were slow and did not give a clear picture of the results. PhotoSweeper is well laid out giving you a good visual display of what photos are considered duplicates. There are many options to fine tune how a duplicate is determined. I am still learning how to take advantage of all the options, but even just using the defaults I was finding duplicates within minutes of installing the software. One suggestion, if you are expecting a lot of duplicates, work with small groups. My first try was to compre 75,000 photos. PhotoSweeper found ~2000 duplicates within about 15 minutes. It was going to take couple of hours to convince myself that I was deleting the right photo and currently there is no way to save your comparisons, if you want to take a break from reviewing duplicates. I’m sure in time I will be more comfortable just deleting the duplicates without review. Finally, the support team has been FANTASTIC. I have emailed them a few times as I ws getting started. Their responses were right on target and extremely timely (usually less than 2 hrs and sometimes in minutes). As I said, Very pleased.

This program has proven extremely helpful in eliminating the clutter from my photo library. You have to pay attention to all the details when eliminating duplicates, but all the information is readily available. It helps you to know, not only what photos appear to be duplicates, but also lets you know details about the photos and importantly, their location. I highly recommend it.

Some excellent, powerful features make this app stand above the rest: 1. You can adjust the similarity metric for the duplicate finding algorithm. So if you want to find all similar (but not identical) photos, this app will do it. 2. You can set preferences for auto-marking which duplicate photos to discard. For example, say you always want to discard resized (smaller) photos, or the older version of a photo, or the RAW version, or whatever. You set the preference, auto-mark them, and then discard. 3. Fast — it took about 1 minute to find 12,000 duplicate photos on my 2012 MBPro, and about 5 minutes to remove them

I initally tried to perform the task of searching for duplicate photos with Gemini, which is rated as one of the top duplicate finding apps out there. I found almost none. If you are into photography and have multiple copies of pics - PhotoSweeper is the way to go. I do my searching in two steps. First step, look for exact duplicates with same name. Here is pretty safe to use the auto marking tool and delete because only truly identical pics will be selected. Next, I do a second search where I look for pics with different name but closely matched. Since you have already cleared away the exact duplicates, you’ll have a manageable quantity of duplicates here. You can’t use the auto selection for this, you’ll need to go through them manually - but of course that’s EXACTLY what you want to do. The comparison screen is great and very effective. 5 stars. Go buy it. Sure it’s expensive but if I didn’t waste time and money with other apps before I went to this I’d still have money left over jiggling in my pocket… I don’t normally write reviews but I wish somebody had written this review before I bought it —> PhotoSweep is money well spent.

i am infamous for duplicating images and stickingt them in different places on my computer. macbook pro mid 2009. I also have several photo editing apps (standard apple, plus lightroom, pixelator, acorn, intensifiy and more — and I think/worry that many of them independently download the pictures from my camera creating even more duplicates. Regardless, I had 15,000 pictures from tiff images that I created with the grab app to pics from my jpeg, etc. from cameras. Although PhotoSweeper allows you to easily download pictures from multiple folders and libraries, I used Apple’s Find app to search for all images on my computer and then move them to all to a single folder on an external drive. I also emptied all the iPhoto and new Photos libraries, as well as lightroom cataloges, etc. (I figure I can put back whatever pics I want in each, when I want to) into that single folder. Then I selected that file through PhotoSweeper’s tool (again very easy). The program gathered all the pictures, fairly quickly considering how many I had. I pressed the combined button, and sorted the photos into groups of duplicate photos (side by side was my choice to display them). Again very quick considering. I had the program auto-mark the ones to delete. I could have just delted the duplicates, but I want to check each one. I almost always chose to delete the pics that the program chose, but not always, and a few times I kept some duplicates for various reasons. Being anal about checking each grouping mean it took several hours, but if you are more fleixlbe and more organized, it could be done much faster. Once I was done reviewing each group, the program quickly got rid of the duplicates. I strongly recommned it, and I am not easily impressed by photo apps — which is why I have so many editing apps.

This program is fantastic. Its default settings are very thoughtful — for example, it will keep the higher resolution if you have duplicate files that are different sizes. You can first look for exact matches and then gradually ratchet back to look for more and more differences, until you decide that the level of difference is at the point that they are not duplicates (to you). It turned out that most of my duplicates were actually 99.9% identical according to Photosweeper because they were different sizes (I had downloaded duplicates of 1000+ images over the years). * Apple Photos (2015) * It is possible to get in trouble deleting important photos. With the new Apple Photos app depending on your settings you may not have all of the original full resolution images on your laptop/desktop. I therefore recommend running Photosweeper only on a computer that has all of the full resolution images downloaded. If you see a lot of 0 KB images listed as duplicates, give Photos more time (days, perhaps) to download the images and then start to use Photosweeper.

This app works flawlessly. It never crashes, easy to understand. Amazing that it finds duplicates that you create over time by moving photos from one place to another. Then you can take it to the next step and it finds different photos that are similar to eachother, so you can clean your library. Most people take several shots of the same thing, you can pick your few favorites. You don’t even have to delete the ones you don’t like, just move them to a different folder. I went through each of its matches by hand for the first few thousand photos, never found a mistake. Now I trust the engine enough just to have it do the work for me. I would pay way more for this after using it. Perfect product in my opinion…nothing else does the same thing and if I were an app deveoper I wouldn’t even try to compete.

Excellent. 10 bucks is a bargain for what this app does. I consolidated all my pictures from several places into Photos, and ended up with multiple copies. This quickly and safely solved that. Easy to use, yet does everything you want it to do, and without the risk of losing any precious photos. Absolutely recommended.

I was getting ready to put together a slideshow featuring pictures from the year and I knew that I had duplicates of a lot of photos. The problem: they were not only different file names, but also different file signatures, different file sizes. I had compressed some photos but mixed the originals in as well. It was a mess. All the other “duplicate finder” apps just looked at file size. They found a whopping three pictures. I finally bought this app hoping that my $10 wasn’t spent in vain. NO IT WAS NOT! Within five minutes PhotoCleaner had analyzed all of the photos in my slideshow folder and detected over 300 duplicates, automatically marked those duplicates for the trash, and let me compare them all the make sure that I was not getting rid of anything I wanted. I hit the trash button - boom! Problem solved! I am very very very impressed. It is rare to find an app that works this smoothly, quickly, precisely. Well done!

Everything worked like a charm, but the instructions in PhotoSweeper say to trash the “Trash (photosweeper)” album it creates in the Photos app. Deleting this album does not delete the photos; what it does do is start you over at square one. What you need to do instead is open the “Trash (photosweeper)” album, select the photos, and delete them there. They’ll go into the recently deleted folder so if you want to get rid of them permanently (now vs. later), go to File, show recently deleted, and delete them again.

whatever you did in the recent release of this update, messed it up, it won’t load any of my photos and when i opened it up after the update it said photo sweeper is damaged, please delete then reinstall. please fix this asap and i’ll fix my review

Added Apple Photos libary to the Media Browser, but it would not load. Sent an inquiry to support. They responded in a couple hours with a pre-release version that works as designed. I’ve used PS for years. It has always worked reliably for me with iPhoto. I have not found anything else that does a good a job at finding duplicates