Find near-duplicate photos
Scan a folder for visually similar — not just identical — photos with perceptual hashing. Free scan, grouped results, move dups to a review folder.
Find near-duplicate photos in a folder with Visual Duplicates — it catches resized, recompressed and lightly edited lookalikes that a checksum scanner misses. Everything runs on your Mac; the folder is never uploaded. Find it under File Tools › Visual Duplicates.
How it works
Unlike a byte-for-byte duplicate finder, this tool compares how images look: it fingerprints each photo with a perceptual hash and groups photos whose fingerprints are close. That's why a WhatsApp-resaved copy of a photo — different file, different bytes, same picture — still lands in the same group.
Run a scan
- Open File Tools › Visual Duplicates and pick the folder to scan.
- Watch the progress line ("Comparing N of M images…"). Scanning is free — it doesn't touch your daily quota.
- The result reads "N near-duplicates in G groups" and "Scanned N images · X reclaimable". Each group shows one keeper badge — the highest-resolution copy (largest file wins ties) — and a duplicate badge on the rest. The list shows the 50 largest groups.
Clean up the duplicates
Move N duplicates to a review folder relocates the non-keeper files into a _duplicates-review subfolder inside the scanned folder — nothing is deleted outright, so you can eyeball the group before emptying it. Moving is a Pro feature; the scan itself stays free.
What it misses
- Exact byte-identical duplicates are also caught — but for pure checksum matching across all file types, Find Duplicates in the same group is the right tool.
- Very different crops or heavy filters can push a photo out of a group.
- The tool scans images only — it won't match a photo against a video frame.