If you’re anything like us, you probably have more duplicate photos laying around your Mac than you know how to deal with, especially considering the multiple tools Apple has created over the years for managing photos. We’ve been through iPhoto, and then Aperture, and now the macOS Photos app, and since digital memories are often precious, it’s not uncommon to be a little reluctant to trash a folder of photos unless you’re absolutely certain that you’ve got a copy somewhere else. So unless you’re hardcore about spending time keeping your file system and photo libraries in pristine order, chances are you’ve got duplicate folders of photos sitting around in dusty corners of your filesystem. Enter PhotoSweeper 3.0 ($10), OverMacs’ latest update to our favorite app for dealing with duplicate photos across all of your libraries and filesystems.
Version 3.0 adds a great new “side-by-side” view that lets you much more easily compare photos from two distinct sources, ensuring that you’re only cleaning up photos from one place while ignoring duplicates within each group. So you could put your Apple Photos library on one side, and a folder full of JPGs on the other to easily eliminate those that you’ve already imported.
PhotoSweeper 3.0 naturally also retains the core feature that makes it great — crunching through your photos wherever they happen to be and identifying exact or near duplicates. It can read iPhoto, Aperture, macOS Photos, and Adobe Lightroom libraries directly, or just deal with any set of folders on your drive, and scan photos within a single library, or across multiple libraries, ferreting out the duplicates based on criteria you specify; you can match up only photos that are exactly the same, or use a combination of bitmap, histogram, timestamp, and other metadata to find near duplicates, such as burst photos or photos that have been edited or resized.
You can then go through them manually and figure out which ones you want to trash, or use as sophisticated set of auto-marking criteria to automatically flag files based on date, resolution, size, location, and more. With version 3.0, however, the workflow is even more streamlined now with full Touch Bar support for the new MacBook Pro, the ability to restore a session in progress when starting back up,a new startup screen, and simplified workflow throughout. There’s also been another huge improvement in image comparison performance and memory usage, so PhotoSweeper now runs faster than ever. If you’ve been putting off dealing with the clutter of duplicate photos because it’s too much effort, PhotoSweeper might just be the best ten bucks you’ll spend.
