How to Find and Remove Duplicate Files on Windows
dupeGuru, dupeGuru Music Edition, and dupeGuru Pictures Edition
The music and pictures editions are specialized for finding similar music files and pictures. For example, the music edition will find the same song, even if they’re in different MP3 files encoded at different bitrates. Or the pictures edition will find copies of the same photo even if they’ve been resized, rotated, or slightly edited. This utility uses a “fuzzy match” algorithm and can find files that are very similar and not just completely identical.
dupeGuru is completely open-source. The installer won’t attempt to
drag any toolbars or other junk onto your system, and it isn’t even
trying to upsell you to anything.
The interface is simple, but easy to use —
open it, add a few folders or drives you want to scan, and click Scan.
You’ll see a list of duplicate files, and you can easily select and
delete the files you want to remove. Double-click a file in the list to
open and examine it.
VisiPics
Use VisiPics to scan for image files that are very similar, even if they aren’t completely identical. For example, VisiPics will find resized, rotated, edited, and otherwise-modified image files and flag them as duplicates. You may not need these multiple similar copies of photos and other images, so VisiPics can help you here.
dupeGuru and other duplicate-file-removing applications can also do this, but VisiPics has an interface designed with photos in mind. If you have a large collection of digital photos, VisiPics is probably the application to use. It will provide a more visual interface for looking at those photos and clearing our your duplicates.
VisiPics is free — donationware, technically — and won’t try to install any junk on your system.
Duplicate File Finder
Duplicate File Finder is another barebones-yet-functional open-source application with a no-frills interface. It actually has a different approach from other applications. It looks for files that have the exact same size and only then compares them to see if they’re duplicates of each other.
This means you won’t get the almost-but-not-quite-exact matching features other applications provide. However, it also means that Duplicate File Finder should be even faster at scanning through a larger set of files. if you only care about files that are completely identical and not just almost identical, you can save time with Duplicate File Finder. It doesn’t have the prettiest interface, but it definitely works.
Remember, don’t delete duplicate files in system folders — for example, under C:\Program Files or C:\Windows. Programs may depend on having duplicate copies of certain files in specific places. Leave system files alone and only clean up your own personal data files — documents, images, music files, videos, and everything else you might have a duplicate copy of.
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