Finding specific things

Duplicate photos, free

Updated 2026-07-31 · 3 min read

The paid cleaners are unnecessary — Photos does library duplicates, and the shell does the rest.

Inside Photos (free, built in)

Ventura and later: the Duplicates album in the sidebar, populated automatically once analysis finishes (it runs when idle and on power). Select → Merge Duplicates keeps the best copy and combines metadata. This handles the hardest case — visually identical re-imports — using perceptual matching no shell command replicates.

Outside the library

Byte-identical duplicates in Downloads, Desktop and old folders, found by hash:

find ~/Pictures ~/Downloads ~/Desktop -type f \
  \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.heic" -o -iname "*.png" \) \
  -exec md5 -r {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort | uniq -w32 -D

uniq -w32 -D shows only lines whose first 32 characters — the hash — repeat, grouped.

Faster: size before hash

Different sizes cannot be identical, so hash only collisions:

find ~/Pictures -type f -iname "*.jpg" -exec stat -f "%z %N" {} \; | sort -n | \
  awk '{if($1==p)print pl"\n"$0; p=$1; pl=$0}'

Feed those candidates to md5 to confirm.

The pair problem

RAW+JPEG and edited+original pairs are not duplicates — same scene, different files. Hashing correctly leaves them alone (different bytes); a name-only tool would wrongly flag them, which is why hash beats name for this job.

Before deleting

A photo in your library AND on a backup drive is backup, not waste. Trash rather than delete outright, keep it a week, and verify counts. The one irreplaceable photo is always in the batch you deleted without looking.

Common questions

Does macOS have a built-in duplicate photo finder?

Yes — the Duplicates album in Photos on Ventura and later, using perceptual matching to catch near-identical images.

How do I find identical images in the Terminal?

Hash them and group repeats: md5 each file, sort, and show lines where the hash repeats.