How to Delete Duplicate Photos on a Mac

We tend to back up all our memories, selfies, photos and albums from our iPhone, iPad or other storage devices on our Mac. Knowingly or unknowingly, we end up creating clutter on our Mac with duplicate photos. Repeated backup or sync service may add duplicate images on our MacBook.

Unfortunately, there is no inbuilt robust system to find and remove duplicate photos from Mac. We either need to do it manually or take the help of one of the best duplicate photo finder tools to quickly scan and eliminate duplicate photos from our Mac. The manual method is tiring and time taking yet can’t assure 100% results. If you maintain different folders, it will be more difficult to segregate duplicate images from different folders.

We normally don’t consider removing duplicate photos on Mac until and unless we run out of storage space or we start getting alerts of storage space almost full. When we want to make room for upcoming images, we think of cleaning duplicate photos and declutter our device. Let’s try out a few manual steps before we use best duplicate photo finder for Mac.

Using Smart Folders

Creating a Smart Folder in the Finder App can help you find duplicate photos manually on a Mac. You can apply special filters in the smart folders and it can work as a search engine for your query.

Step 1. Go to the Finder app on your Mac.

Step 2. Open the File menu and click on the ‘New Smart Folder’ option to initiate a search query.

Step 3. Click on the '+' plus button at the top right corner of the window.

Step 4. Search for a picture file format like JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, or TIFF in the search criteria. Also specify the location to search like a folder, drive or the entire hard drive.

Step 5. Hold down the Command key and select found duplicates that need to be deleted from the device.

Step 6. You can sort the results by Name, Date Last Opened, Kind or other filters. Smart Folders are not only useful in searching for duplicate photos but can also be used to find videos, music, documents and other file formats. You can compare files with similar names, size, file formats to remove duplicate photos on Mac.

Using Google Photos

Google Photos is not just another cloud storage as iCloud but it comes with some serious filters and search engines for duplicate image finder. Google Photos is an inbuilt app that comes with the Google Account. You can store up to 15 GB of photos on Google Photos or other documents on Google Drive while iCloud storage is only limited to 5 GB of storage space.

Step 1. Open Safari or Google Chrome and log in to your Google account.

Step 2. Go to the Google Apps icon on the top right and click on the ‘Photos’ option.

Step 3. Create an album and upload all the photos from your Mac on the Google Photos App.

Step 4. Google Photos has a search engine that can identify duplicate photos and stop them from getting uploaded. If there are exact identical photos in the queue, they will not upload. If the photos are edited through different software, modified, or there are slight changes in colour scheme, those photos will not be detected by Google Photos.

Step 5. Once the photos are uploaded, you can download all the photos in a separate new folder. Photos in this folder will be lesser in number that we tried to upload. It has already filtered out duplicate photos. Now you can compare both the folders side-by-side by applying different view options. Sort them by Name, Date, Size or other filters and perform a side-by-side comparison. Select duplicate photos from the new folder if found and delete them from the new folder. When you are certain that you are just left with unique photos, you can remove the old folder.

Using Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro for Mac

Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro is one of the finest and best duplicate photo finder apps that you can use to find and remove duplicate photos from Mac. It is compatible with MacOS 10.7 and above or iOS 8 or later.

Step 1. Download and install Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro on your Mac.

Step 2. Open the console and click on the ‘Add Photos’ or ‘Add Folders’ button. You can also drag and drop photos to scan for Duplicates. Click on the ‘Scan for Duplicates’ button to initiate the scan. You can also custom scan by adjusting the matching level, exact or similar match, or bifurcate photos by size, time interval, or GPS locations.

Step 3. Once the scan is complete, it will group all the identical photos for you to preview. All the found duplicates will be auto-selected for deletion.

Step 4. Preview images and select found duplicates that you wish to delete or keep on your Mac.

Step 5. Click on the ‘Delete Marked’ button to remove duplicate photos from Mac.

  “You can also select Google Drive or other external storage devices to scan for duplicate images.”

  Wrapping Up

Accumulating duplicate photos or files on your device is easy however when it comes to find and remove duplicate photos from Mac, it becomes difficult. Unfortunately, Mac or Windows OS doesn’t offer any inbuilt mechanism to find and remove duplicate photos. We can only try a few tricks or use one of the best duplicate photo finders to remove duplicates. Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro is a duplicate image finder that can find and remove duplicate photos from Mac, Windows, Android or iOS. It’s a one-stop solution for duplicate photos.