Find and delete duplicate files and photos

Save space with Find Duplicates in Parallels Toolbox

REQUIRES

Parallels Toolbox for Mac (around $22.04/year), macOS 10.12 or later

YOU WILL LEARN

How to find and delete duplicate files

IT WILL TAKE

10 minutes IT DOESN’T TAKE long to fill your Mac’s hard drive or solid–state drive with clutter. Old photos or work files can quickly take up hundreds of megabytes of precious storage space — take a look at your folder that contains email attachments, you’ll find that alone is taking up a surprising amount of GB.

One common problem is that many of us tend to create duplicate versions of files that people send us — photos from a friend, or PDF files from a work colleague. There’s a tendency to automatically create duplicates of photos and files that we need, say, for work, keeping the originals safe in one folder while editing the duplicates in another.

There are many apps that can help you deal with duplicate files, but the one we go to most is part of the Parallels Toolbox suite (from parallels.com). Toolbox costs around $22 per year, but it includes more than 30 different apps and utilities, and its Find Duplicates tool works very much like Spotlight, so it feels familiar. Toolbox also offers a seven–day free trial so that you can check it out first. CLIFF JOSEPH