I recently did a full cleanup of all my old devices and storage—stuff from early digital cameras, old phones, external drives, you name it—and dumped everything onto one SSD so I could finally organize it properly.
Now that it’s all in one place, I’m realizing just how many duplicates I’ve accumulated over the years. Because I didn’t want to accidentally overwrite anything during the transfer, I kept saving multiple versions whenever there was a conflict. So now I’ve got tons of identical photos sitting in the same folders, just with slightly different names.
Manually sorting through this isn’t really doable at this scale. What I’m trying to figure out is whether there’s a way to detect duplicates based on the actual file data (not just file names), and then safely remove the extras while keeping one original copy. Any suggestions or tools that work well for this?
I ran into the same issue after merging a bunch of old backups. What worked for me was using a duplicate finder that scans files based on content instead of names. That way it can still catch identical photos even if they were renamed.
Most of these tools will group duplicates together so you can quickly review and keep one copy. Just make sure to double-check anything that might be slightly edited (like resized or filtered versions), since those may not always count as exact duplicates.
On that scale, don’t try to clean it up manually. Use a duplicate finder that scans by content, you’ll miss a lot, or delete the wrong stuff.
I had a similar mess after pulling files from a few old drives—duplicates everywhere and no way I was sorting that manually. I tried a couple of duplicate finders, and the key thing is to use one that checks file content instead of just names.
I ended up sticking with iBoysoft Cleaner since it grouped identical files together pretty clearly, so I could quickly go through and keep one copy. Still took a bit of reviewing, but way faster than doing it folder by folder.