It’s pretty much inevitable in this digital age that you’ll eventually find your Mac cluttered up with duplicate photos, documents, and other files that have just somehow become misfiled in different directories, exported for sharing, and more. Making sense of all of this can be a challenge, but fortunately there’s MacPaw’s Gemini 2 ($20), an intelligent duplicate finder that can help you recover a ton of space on your Mac by ferreting out duplicate — and even similar — files, and smartly choosing which ones to keep and which to throw away. Gemini 2 can quickly scan through your Mac’s home folder, shared folders, even external hard drives, or even network shares to track down identical files that you’ve left laying around.
Once Gemini has identified your dupes, a quick “Smart Cleanup” option can make short work of them all with a minimum of user interaction, or you can dig in and look at the selections for yourself, deciding which ones to keep and which to throw away. Although Gemini will only ever throw away exactly identical files automatically — and even then it just tosses them into the trash by default — users who want to make absolutely certain can pore through the list of duplicates in manual mode, selecting which ones to keep and which to toss on a file-by-file basis. While tagging files, Gemini 2 will also look for patterns in your manual selections — for example if you’re only selecting the newest copies of each set — and offer to intelligently select more files for you based on what you’re already doing.
To make things even more efficient, Gemini will track down and group entire folders of identical files, which can help you make short work of dozens or even hundreds of files with a single click, even in manual mode. Gemini can also scan your Photos library for not only duplicate, but similar photos (do you really need a dozen or more retakes of the same landmark?), and duplicate tracks in your iTunes library.
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