What Is the Best Software to Find Duplicate Photos?

No matter whether you are a photographer, a designer or someone who likes taking photos, you'll be faced with the problem of having a lot of duplicate images sooner or later. It will happen even if you are a neat person who organizes photos instead of just dumping them into the Images folder. Duplicate photos are usually created by accident either when you are transferring photos from your camera or when you copy them to a different folder. That's as far as exact copies go. But think about all the resized, converted and edited images plus multiple shots of the same subject you may have. All these duplicates may be taking up gigabytes of disk space and making it harder to manage your photos.

The easiest way to deal with duplicate photos and images is to use duplicate photo finding software. While there are heaps of general duplicate file finders, a good duplicate photo finder is hard to find. So, here are the best programs to find duplicate photos that I've tried out.

Duplicate Photo Cleaner

This is my favourite duplicate photo finder. It's really easy to use, has a great preview feature, supports all image formats including RAW, and it works on both Windows and Mac. That's rare because most duplicate image finders only work on Windows. What I really liked about Duplicate Photo Cleaner was that you can control the level of similarity of the search results. Put simply, if you set the similarity level at 100%, the program will only look for exact copies. But if you set it for something like 95%, the search results will return resized, edited and just similar shots. Don't know about you, but it takes me ages to get some shots just right and then I'm left with all these failed attempts. If I don't delete them straight away, sorting through my photos becomes a little catastrophe. Duplicate Photo Cleaner helped me a lot and made it really easy to delete the shots I didn't need.

Duplicate Photo Finder

This is another good program to find duplicate photos. Just like Duplicate Photo Cleaner, it can compare photos by content using an intelligent algorithm and supports all popular image formats, including RAW. This allows it to detect similar images and true duplicates. While Duplicate Photo Finder has a lot of useful features, I found it not as easy to use as Duplicate Photo Cleaner. And it's Windows only. But it's still a very good duplicate photo finder with good preview options and it's definitely worth considering.

VisiPics

If you are looking for a lightweight free duplicate image finder, then VisiPics is the way to go. The program is only 1.9MB in size, but it uses five different image comparison techniques that allow to achieve really good photo comparison results. The program is quite easy to use, even though its interface is somewhat basic and old-fashioned. But hey, who wants to pay attention to the interface when it's a free program that works really well and supports RAW! This is a Windows only program.

In my opinion, these are the best programs to find and delete duplicate photos and similar images. Check them out and let me know which one you liked in your comments!