PhotoSweeper App Reviews

This is a great app! It’s very intuitve, yet at the same time isn’t a black box that makes decisions for you without your understanding the process. The devs were helpful and responsive as well to a couple of questions I had. 5/5 would recommend.

Got rid of 1670 duplicate pictures - Happy Camper

Superb utility that does what it says and is priced reasonably too. Bravo. Thanks for a solid product, great user experience, and even well written manual! :-)

I wish I understood HOW this application did the comparisons. But it works, so so well! I love the adjustments you can make - it’ll find all the photos in a series and I can remove the blurry ones. Great for me right now - lots of shots of my baby but often only one of three is in focus. This app is fantastic - I am so, so pleased with it!!! And it’s amazingly fast. I have a mid-2009 MBP and I’m shocked by how quickly it does the comparisons.

I’ve tried so many of these duplicate apps and found them wanting. This app is flawless and I was amazed when it found duplicate photos in places I didn’t even know I had! Thanks so much for this wonderful app and I appreciate the time it saves me, not mention all the manual labor!

This is a promising and robust problem, but it’s flawed. It sports an enormous number of options, as compared to some other duplicate-photo finders. That said, it hasn’t really worked for me. After numerous passes, even with extremely liberarlly settings applied, PhotoSweeper consistently misses duplicate photos that are clearly all-but-exact replicas of one another. I’ve given this a few months of use now, and I’m fairly certain I’m not missing anything; I understand the settings. It makes no difference, as I’m consistently finding duplicates by going through my files myself, which uses a lot of time. This essentially defeats the purpose of the software; if I have to check its work, all the time, then it’s not truly working at all. The one thing it does exceptionally well is find *similar* photos—e.g., two photos snapped within moments of each other which are almost alike but which aren’t truly duplicates. I use this program for that. For duplicates, I use Duplicate Detective, which does its job perfectly. This may just be me. I uses Photos to organize my collection. I have tens of thousands of images. Perhaps others will have better luck in other systems.

I ran through the filters several times, broadening the scope for searching and comparing with each round, shaved several gigs off my old and very bloated library. Well worth the ten dollars considering how valueable pictures can be. Many free/lower cost comparable apps frightened me off, seeing users complaining about corrupting files and losing images in large libraries. Get what you pay for these days I suppose.

I used it to clean up my iPhoto / Aperture Unified Library after unification. Now, I have to deal with the Photos debacle but I’m sure when (and if) I trust Photos with my Aperture workflow, this app will be useful again. It just worked…as all apps on Apple Mac OS should.

Does not see any of my Lightroom files. Followed directions for adding method and for dragging on to Media Browser. Will change review if software is updated to work. At this point I wish I did not purchase.

Had a rather large photo collection from the last 4 years with more than 25,000 photos taking up about 100GB of space. We hadn’t done a great job of organizing but needed to. Started tedious process and realized it was too much to do manually. In less than an hour I sorted through more than 4,000 duplicates, could quickly select/deselect photos that I felt were/were not duplicates and move all those duplicates safely to trash without worry. Probably saved me more than 5 hours of manual time so at $9.99 it was a value just on the first run alone.

Works like a charm!

Used on a network with literally tens of thousands of images, sometimes finding and working on 75,000+ on a single external hard drive. Customer suport is the finest I have ever encpuntered, normally response with minutes, if not an hour, even on Saturday and Sunday. Can’t speak highly enough about this app….best $10 purchase ever.

I had a library of over 19,000 photos which had thousands of duplicates. I tried several apps before PhotoSweeper, including Duplicate File Cleaner, Duplicate Detective, and Photos Duplicate Cleaner. None of them found more than a handful of duplicates--and some found no duplicates--even after tweaking the settings to be as lenient as possible. I contacted one of those developers and they responded to say that the sample duplicates I sent them were not actually duplicates! (They definitely were duplicates, not retouched or modified in any way.) Then I found PhotoSweeper, and despite it being more expensive than the others, and feeling a bit dubious at that point, I decided to give it a shot. So glad I did. It worked amazingly well, finding all the duplicates (over 9000) and auto-marking them for deletion, in a matter of minutes. Thanks devs for such an exceptional app!

This is the only duplicate finder that I could tune enough to find *all* of my duplicates. Some of the other apps also use complex image recognition (including file size, dimensions, time shot, histogram comparison, etc.), but this one has more/better options and a much better interface. I had to manually approve a lot of the duplicates because in order to catch all of them I was also catching very similar (not identical) photos, but this sped up the process immensely. If you’re having trouble finding all of your duplicates note that different search parameters will find different *kinds* of duplicates. I had to try about 6 different approaches before I could eventually get them all. There’s no one perfect algorithm for finding all duplicates, so stay vigilant and open-minded!

Bought all the other app that find duplicate photos and this is the only one that has any benefits. It found many duplicates and did what was advertised. Other Apps. I bought couldnt even load up large libraies of photos, this app could. That being said, I feel that the search options for duplicate photos should have more options (granted this app has more than any others out there that I just wasted my money on). I noticed it has been missing many files that are the same pic just scanned in differnet formats. Trying to find a way for the app to see the duplicates I contacted there support and they got back to me within a day (that is saying more than the other apps. too that have not responded —still). To find them I used the “Series of shots” method with 0 seconds (PhotoSweeper uses milliseconds so results will be precise). And I used the “Similar Photos” method with 0 seconds and set the Matching Level to lower value. Found many more but, this took hours and hours. Over all, great for what out there these days, just think it could be even better!

I had a problem with IPhoto just before conversion to Photo. The local Mac store corrected the problem, but I had a duplicate library and when Photos installed I had a mess. Have been trying to manage this and getting nowhere. Installed Photo Sweeper and in just hours I have deleted lots of duplicates and now can manage my library. Thank you Photo Sweeper!

This doesn’t seem to work directly on my whole Photos Library but by exporting groups as files it was able to find duplicates and shots taken in quick order (great for bracketed shots). It was very accurate and effective.

On installing this and importing the Pictures library, I started with a basic duplicate comparison to test the app. It turned up only 14 duplicate photos out of a library of 10s of thousands. Moreover, when I returned to Photos, all the custom albums and even the Faces settings I had taken days to set up were gone. Unbelievable. To make matters worse only a fraction of the photos I had on disk were visible.

This is an amazing app. I quickly found 13+ gigs of dupes. The automatic settings chose the best one to keep 99% of the time. Additionally you can tweakt he settings to refine the searches. Quick, painless and good. I highly recommend this app. Plus it works with Aperture, iPhoto, Photo, Capture One and Lightroom. I have all of them though I’m now migrating to Lightroom.

This is so far one of the best utilities for photo management with a Mac I’ve come across. I have used the ACDSee duplicate finder as part of its PC program and then Mac, very straightforward on the PC but not so facile working with Mac’s library systems and master, etc. I tried a Mac-specific Dupe finder with simple interface, producing an excel-like list of duplicates to check and delete, but it was limited and not so easy to be sure the right file (original vs. duplicate) was being deleted. Anyway, fast forward to the (d)evolution of iPhotos into Photos, and finding my 1TB Mac drive teetering towards slowing the system down from being so full, Tens of thousands of images, backed from many drives and machines, and I’ve given it another try, after reading reviews of several App Store and other highly-regarded dupe-finders for Mac, and with particular attention to its being used with iPhoto (where my huge collection will continue to live, with star ratings and albums of raw and video files I’ve worked on for years, That’s my context. Something which works with iPhoto library and external drives, and gives me some control. This guy really delivers! Now to my first experience with it: Installation simple. As are the instructions. (A few important pointers about closing the library first before importing to its list for comparing images and finding dupes.) Dragged and dropped all my albums from Mac’s HD/iPhoto/Library (you can do the same with Photos and Lightroom and a few other apps). It took about 10 minutes (first time loading 200,000 images and some videos) and the display - using a 27” display, it’s beautiful! - immediately grouped a tile display (lie a slide sorter, not tiny threads). Once layed out before me I chose to “compare”, which is really the one-step process, but with a choice as to comparing exact matches versus broader almost-matches, which might include re-sized files (detected by histogram or bitmap, your choice) or different formats. I went with the basic first, to try it. Having read about 2 minutes of instructions, it was very intuitive. I found the option to arrange by size, for my first attempt to de-gunk years of duplicate file accumulation. I eliminated 8 Gb of duplicate files - mostly .tif, .nef and video files but lots of .jpegs too. Mindful of the usual advice to be careful not to inadvertently delete precious images by accident, it’s nice to know it deletes into the app you use for image viewing (e.g., iPhoto or Photos), into its trash. So I opened up iPhoto after the deletions from Sweeper, and double checked a copy was still where it had been. Indeed. Perfect. Deleted 8 Gb safely, first try. Beyond dupe finding - the display of found duplicates also shows some errors in files, and you have a choice to auto-trust it to delete the right copy or you can do it manually. I found several videos in iPhoto which were “there” in name, but with corrupt or missing data. So I replaced the bad with a new copy from backup, and found some long-forgotten great images while doing this, and found overlapping dates, all kinds of pure gold organizing and deletion tools. It’s just wonderful, and I’ve not even gotten into looking for duplicate databases or other things, and next up still is external drives, which it does easily. So, I’m happy I read the reviews and product info (decided on this as opposed to Gemini, which also has fans,at the same price. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a new tool as much as this, for pleasantly organizing and tidying a vast photo library and archives. For less than the price of a movie, I’m a happy camper, giving thanks, on Thanksgiving too. Nice product, worked just amazingly and intuitively, with great results, the best dupe finder I’ve yet come across.