Dupe guide

Find duplicate photos on Mac

Track down duplicate photos eating up your Mac storage. A safe, byte-exact method that won't risk your originals.

4 min read

You imported the same camera roll twice. Or AirDropped a batch of photos to yourself and forgot. Or copied a folder from an old Mac without realising the photos were already there. Now your Pictures folder is bloated and you can’t tell what’s original and what’s a copy.

Two paths

The native way: Photos app + Finder

The Photos app on macOS Ventura and later has a built-in “Duplicates” album.

  1. Open Photos.
  2. In the sidebar under “Utilities,” click “Duplicates.”
  3. Review pairs that Photos has flagged.
  4. Click “Merge” to combine them.

That covers photos inside the Photos library, but it misses anything sitting loose in Finder — folders of JPEGs on your Desktop, exports in Downloads, backup folders from old phones. For those, you’d have to sort by name and size in Finder and manually compare, which is tedious and unreliable for thousands of files.

The Dupe way

Dupe scans any folder you point it at and finds byte-identical photos by computing a SHA-256 hash of each file’s contents. It doesn’t care about filenames or modification dates — just the actual image data.

  1. Open Dupe and click “Add Folder.”
  2. Add your Pictures folder, any photo backup folders, your Desktop, and external drives where photos might live.
  3. Click “Scan.” Dupe walks every JPEG, PNG, HEIC, RAW, and video file and hashes it.
  4. Browse the duplicate groups. Each group shows file paths so you can see where the copies came from.
  5. Pick which copy to keep (Dupe can pre-select for you) and click “Move to Trash.”

A note on “duplicates” vs “similar photos”: Dupe finds exact duplicates only. If you have two versions of the same photo — one edited, one original — Dupe won’t lump them together because the bytes differ. That’s deliberate. You won’t accidentally lose an edit by trusting Dupe with your library.

Safety guarantees:

If you want to clean duplicates inside the Photos library itself, use the built-in Duplicates album. If you want to find duplicates across your Mac — Desktop folders, Downloads, backups, external drives — Dupe is what you want. $14.99 lifetime, one purchase.

← All Dupe tips