Delete duplicate photos

Free up space on your Mac’s hard drive by consolidating your images

Just how much space on your hard drives is taken up by duplicated photos? Thanks to two free programs – Duplicate Photos Cleaner and Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto – you can easily go through a selected drive, folder or iPhoto library and weed out unnecessary copies, potentially freeing up many gigabytes of drive space.

Both apps are available free through the App Store and – once installed – work in a similar way. The only real difference is how you select what to scan – the step-bystep guide opposite reveals what to do with Duplicate Photos Cleaner, while Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto will first ask you to launch iPhoto, then select your chosen iPhoto library before going through it looking for duplicates.

Note that Duplicate Photos Cleaner can’t compare the contents of multiple drives, so you can’t inadvertently delete any photos backed up to another hard disk. Also beware that cleaning photos using either program means deleting them completely – they aren’t simply moved to the trash. So proceed with caution and if you haven’t backed up your photos, do so after cleaning up to ensure you have a fail-safe copy. Nick Peers

You can easily weed out copies, freeing up many gigabytes of hard drive space