Tool For Finding Duplicates Mac 2016

If so, keep reading, because today we’ll show you how to delete email duplicates from your mailbox without purchasing a costly duplicate remover tool for Outlook 2016. We’ll first explain the most prevalent reasons for this annoying email duplication. Find and Delete Duplicate Files the Easy Way with Duplicate Cleaner Pro If you’re really serious about finding and killing duplicate files, your best bet is Duplicate Cleaner Pro, which has an extremely simple interface with powerful features to delete duplicate files. View the list of duplicates in the left pane of the tool window. View differences between the found duplicates in the right pane. Use the arrow buttons to place the selected duplicate in one of the sections of the differences viewer and compare fragments of the code.

Duplicate files are a waste of disk space, consuming that precious SSD space on a modern Mac and cluttering your Time Machine backups. Remove them to free up space on your Mac.

There are many polished Mac apps for this — but they’re mostly paid software. Those shiny apps in the Mac app store will probably work well, but we have some good options if you don’t want to whip out your credit card.

Gemini and Other Paid Apps

If you do want to spend money on a duplicate-file-finder app, Gemini looks like one of the best options with the slickest interfaces. The trial version worked well for us, and the interface certainly stands out from barebones, free applications like dupeGuru. Gemini can also scan your iTunes and iPhoto library for duplicates. If you’re willing to pay $10 for a better interface, Gemini seems like a good bet.

There are other, similarly polished duplicate-file-finders in the Mac App Store, too — but Apple flags this one as an Editors’ Choice, and we can see why.

As a bonus, the demo version of Gemini allows you to search for and find duplicates, but not remove them. So, if you really wanted, you could use the demo to find duplicates on your Mac, locate them in Finder, and then remove them by hand. Other paid duplicate-file-finder apps have demos that function in a similar way, so this may be convenient if you just want to run an occasional scan and you don’t mind deleting a handful of duplicates by hand.

There are many good-quality, paid duplicate-file-finding apps for Mac. You can find them with a quick trip to the Mac App Store.

dupeGuru, dupeGuru Music Edition, and dupeGuru Pictures Edition

RELATED:10 Ways To Free Up Disk Space on Your Mac Hard Drive

We also recommended dupeGuru for finding duplicate files on Windows. This application is both open-source and cross-platform. It’s simple to use — open the application, add one or more folders to scan, and click Scan. You’ll see a list of duplicate files, and you can select them and easily move them to the Trash or another folder. You can also preview them, verifying that they actually are duplicates before tossing them away.

dupeGuru is available in three different flavors — a standard edition, an edition designed for finding duplicate music files, and an edition designed for finding duplicate pictures. These tools won’t just find exact duplicates, but should find the same songs encoded at different bitrates and the same picture resized, rotated, or edited.

This application is utilitarian, but it does its job well. You don’t get the shiny interface that you do with the paid Mac apps, but it’s a good free tool for finding and clearing duplicate files. If you want a free application for finding and removing duplicate files on a Mac, this is the one to use.

iTunes

iTunes has a built-in feature that can find duplicate music and video files in your iTunes library. It won’t help with other types of files or media files not in iTunes, but it can be a quick way to free up some space if you have a big media library with duplicate files.

To use this feature, open iTunes, click the View menu, and select Show Duplicate Items. You can also hold the Option key on your keyboard and then click the Show Exact Duplicate Items link. This will only show duplicates with the same exact name, artist, and album.

After you click this, iTunes will show you a sorted list of duplicates next to each other. You can go through the list and delete any duplicates from your computer if they actually are duplicates you want to delete. When you’re done, click View > Show All Items to get back to the default list of media.

That’s it? Yup, that’s it. We didn’t want to recommend potentially confusing Terminal commands that output a list of duplicates to a text file, awkward methods that involve scrolling through a list of all the files on your Mac in the Finder, or applications that require disabling the Mac’s Gatekeeper feature to run untrusted binaries. The tools above will do the job, whether you want a barebones-and-free utility or a polished-but-paid application.

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Before we get started

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Duplicate files such as documents and photos can occupy a surprising amount of space on your Mac’s hard disk and you might not even realise they are there.

Mac duplicate finder

Perhaps you’ve copied files into several folders and external USB drives, and additional copies could exist in the Mail downloads folder. You might even find a few gigabytes of duplicate content in iTunes, normally because several albums from the same artist might contain the same tracks (e.g. an album and a greatest hits).

It’s therefore a good idea to get rid of those unwanted duplicates which are just clogging up your system, especially if you’re a bit low on disk space.

There are several ways to find and delete duplicate files in Mac OS X:

iTunes also has the ability to find duplicate items, which is covered later in this tutorial.

METHOD 1: Use a Third-Party Application

Find Duplicates Mac

There are dozens of apps available in the Mac App Store which can find and remove duplicate files. Some are free whereas others charge a small fee. They all do pretty much the same thing but some have much more comprehensive features and allow you to filter by filename only or the actual content. For example, it’s possible that multiple identical files have different filenames – utilities such as those mentioned below can help to analyse the contents of files on a byte level to determine if they really are duplicates.

We have tested and found these apps to be effective, but its worth noting there are many more available on the Mac App Store:

METHOD 2: Use Finder to Locate Duplicates

Duplicate files can be found quite easily using Finder. The process is rather slow because you need to manually decide which ones to keep and which to delete, but with just a little time and patience you can locate most duplicate items.

Follow the method below:

  1. Open a new Finder window
  2. In the search field, enter the wild card asterisk symbol
  3. Make sure the Size and Kind columns are displayed
  4. Filter the results by Kind, and you will see the list of similar items

Finding Duplicates In Excel 2013

This method is fairly accurate because it shows identical files listed by name, type, and size. Just delete any files that you don’t want to keep but make sure they really are duplicates first. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t let you determine whether the files are true byte-level copies but there is enough information presented to be able to make an informed decision. The main drawback with this method is the amount of time it takes to go through the items one at a time.

A Note on How to Remove Duplicate Items in iTunes

Fortunately iTunes provides the ability to check for duplicate files, as follows:

Excel Function For Finding Duplicates

  1. Make sure you’ve highlighted the relevant item in your iTunes library (such as Music, Films, Podcasts, etc)
  2. In the File menu, select Display Duplicates

Any duplicate items found will be displayed in the main iTunes window, allowing you to simply delete them as normal.

Tool For Find Duplicates Mac 2016