Duplicate Detective: Cleaner App Reviews

Everynow and again I run this app to find duplicates. The hashing technique gives me complete confidence that the app is doing a great job at finding duplicates. I’ve saved gig and gigs of space. This has resulted in a larger HD footprint and smaller time machine backups. I recommend this app for anyone who wants to not only shed some space on their drives but more importantly remove duplicates that might otherwise cause some confusion. The only thing I think that is missing when manually going through duplicates found (an auto feature is built in) would be to select multiple file and choose the newer or older file, otherwise it is quite perfect.

hi, it works like magis. I used it to scan my media files on synology server with usb drive connected to it. It took a while as it is a network job and files were 30GBs+ bu finally found 30 duplications. good job - well done ;) !

Work with photos. Works great.

Easy to use, efficient, quick, and as far as my verifications go, accurate. That is all I asked for.

It works for very small folders, but when you try to scan big folders, it stopps at 140k files… every time..

Nice tool for finding duplicates. Beware that it refuses to scan the ~/Library folder, so you cannot use it for finding duplicate emails, unless you manage to hard link ~/Library to another folder with a different name (you must use some low-level kernel API to do this). This "unfeature" should be documented, so people wont buy the app if they want to use it this way. Also, it may take a looong time to complete if you have many files (after >8 hours it still didnt finish processing nearly 120000 files).

The interface is OK, besides some minor glitches. However it froze while I was using it (spinning wheel after I selected a group of files).

Does what it says! Just freed up 41.8 gig of dupe movies and pictures. Be patient when using this to scan large drives or on network drives. (e.g. I did a whole laptop drive and let it run over night). I’ve used other types of programs where I was less confident that the files were 100% duplicates. Could use a little more control of delete preference.

Great at finding duplicate pictures, songs, downloads. Easy to use. A lot of the photos in iPhotos, i also have in photoshop bridge, so it is good at deleteing them in iPhoto. Good at finding downloads i forgot about and don’t need.

This software App is absolutely Awesome! Quick and easy to use and very precise in the finding of all duplicate Item. Never thougt I had so many Duplicate Item. File and Video! Unbelievable! I like to work with Video and it come from diferent folder when it come to editing. The point is, That when evere I make short clip and save them in deferent folders category, I lose track of were there are. Now I can Delete what I dont want and make room for otheres important file in your Drive. No more waste of Duplicate File of any kind taking up space on your Drive, thank to Duplicate App Software. Good job to the team developer, love it.

Removed over 1000 duplicate files from my imac. Don’t ask me how they got there. LoL

This app works well and is totally worth the $2.99 but it would be SO much better if you could incrementally delete duplicates as you review them, instead of going through all the files, selecting which ones to delete, and then deleting all the selections. You wouldn’t necessarily need to delete them one by one, but rather if after deleting a batch you could go back to the scan results and choose more to delete (of course, the results screen would have fewer duplicates, since you have just deleted some); currently after you delete some files you need to rescan the whole folder (which can take hours if there are a lot of files).

Interface is simple and attractive. Works like a charm.

I’m in the process of comparing old backups with current files. To do that the compare folder feature is nice. But when it finds hundreds of folders that are duplicated between the two drives, which is expected, there is no way to say “Always keep this folder on Drive X and remove duplicates from Drive Y” when Auto Selecting. Without this feature, you can either let it choose based on newest or oldest, or manually review each and every duplicate and choose the correct one yourself. If you let it choose newest or oldest, and they are exactly the same (usually the case in a copy of a folder), the software seems to choose at random and you end up with a lot of folders removed on one drive and different ones on the other drive. I paid for this app, used it on a few things I didn’t care much about, and now won’t use it again becuase there is nothing it does that the other application I bought right after doesn’t do better. That app is Gemini. I didn’t get it first because from what I could tell, this one did all the same things for a third the cost. That turned out to not be true. I actually can’t think of how “Delete the oldest” version is even useful. How often is a file exactly the same, and has a different date? Now, how often do you want to get rid of all the duplicates in one location while leaving a copy in a different location that you will use? Unless I’m missing something in the incredibly sparse preferences of this app, that’s simply not possible without doing it manually, one deeply nested folder at a time. I wasted more time than money on this app.

Works beautifully with the Photos app! I removed more than 1,000 duplicate photos, some with different metadata and names! Has an annoying opening screen where it seeks your email and asks you to buy other apps (odd for a paid app), but once you hit continue it doesn’t persist.

This tool finds all those "Better make a copy just in case" files. Those duplicates you forgot and now are just creating confusion or wasted disk space or both. You can remove them one-by-one or use autoscan and remove the newest or oldest versions in bulk. Great for cleaning up directories of audio and music files from the same artist in different places. Gets really slow with big directories of files, bring a book. Be very careull with this application. I recommend going into the preferences and selecting "Move deleted files to trash" and leaving them in there a day or two. I used this app at an old job and it was great, but some files that I did not want to delete ended up in the trash so I went in and restored them. Be very careful because this utility can delete whole drives. If its used with care, its a great thing to have in your Mac toolbox.

Good app. Saves a ton of work. Easy to use. However when used on large collections of files (100K+) the app crashes. Just a guess that there is some built-in assumption about how many files can be scanned and processed. No app running on a 64-bit virtual memory machine should worry about allocating the memory needed to process long lists. At the least the app should detect when the processing requirements exceed the developer’s assumptions and exit gracefully. Or it could just be a bug. Five stars if this problem is resolved.

I’ve got a thing about photos. I have dupes of dupes of dupes. This seems to have really cleaned things up. Very easy to use, very fast; it scanned 27,000 photos in under 5 minutes. Easily worth twice the price.

Works for me! Cleaned 5 gigs. Quick

when i first got this it worked fine.. Now every time I used it , it tells me I dont have permission (issues) and I am the owner of the account… Go figure...