We just finished a big job for a client: She had tens of thousands of image files on her Mac, and most of them were duplicates, which she wanted to eliminate. But the duplicates were not always named the same, nor were they always the same file size, or even the same type of file. What to do?

We used a great program, called dupeGuru, which makes finding these duplicates pretty easy.

The best thing about dupeGuru is that it can find, as it calls them, “fuzzy duplicates” (files that are not exactly the same but are close in various ways). Another benefit is that you can tell the program what to do with the duplicates: It can delete them, or else it can move them to a specific location so you can check them before you delete them. And there’s a version for Windows too.

It has an extensive Preferences panel so you can customize almost everything. For example, you can tell the program to look just for duplicate filenames, or just for duplicate content. You can use what they call “Filter Hardness” to match a specific percentage of content. You can specify where you want duplicates moved. And so on.

There are 3 editions of dupeGuru: The basic edition, for finding general files, is $20; the music edition is $25, and the picture edition is $25.

So dupeGuru sped things up quite a bit for us and our client. There were still lots of settings to configure, and we needed to check the dupes to make sure nothing essential got removed, so it’s not completely automatic, but the process was straightforward and simple.