For some of us, keeping our photos in order can be a confusing mess, and the longer you’ve been into digital photography, the more problematic this is likely to be for all but the most hardcore archivists. While Apple’s iCloud Photo Library promises to fix this going forward, chances are that between Aperture/iPhoto, Finder, and your iOS Camera Roll, some duplicate photos may have crept in somewhere along the way. Sadly, most photo management tools don’t really do a very good job of even preventing you from importing duplicates in the first place, much less finding them after the fact. Fortunately, for those looking to tackle this problem, there’s PhotoSweeper ($10), a handy little tool provided by Overmacs that can quickly crunch through your photos — just about wherever they happen to be stored — and identify various forms of duplicates so that you can more effectively deal with them and clean up your library. We’ve been fans of PhotoSweeper for a while, and with version 2.0 it gets even faster and more intuitive.
PhotoSweeper starts up with a blank slate that you can fill with photos from your Aperture, iPhoto, or even Lightroom libraries, as well as any photos you have laying around in your file system. You can even add photos across multiple libraries — useful if you use both iPhoto and Lightroom, for example, and don’t want to keep your photos in both places. Once you’ve filled up the PhotoSweeper window with all of your photos, one click on the “Compare” button presents a set of easy-to-understand options for making comparisons ranging from exact duplicates to working with similar or serial photos, so you can even use the app to get rid of superfluous burst shots from your DSLR or iPhone. The initial comparison will simply present all of the matches in a different, customizable view, and you can then either go through them manually, or use PhotoSweeper’s “Auto Mark” function – a powerful feature that lets you make short work of duplicates by automatically flagging the photos you want to get rid of based on criteria you set, such as file size, date and time, rating, or which folder or library a photo is located in.
