Top 13 Best Duplicate File Finder and Removers in 2023

Rating: OUTSTANDING

Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder

Duplicate Photo Finder

Similar Images Search

Rating: OUTSTANDING

Duplicate Songs Finder

This is the best tool for finding duplicate songs and similar audio files. It is specialized in organizing audio libraries by identifying repeating tracks and songs. Audio Dedupe made it up to third place on our list as it will “Listen” to your songs in order to find similarities. Uses advanced audio analysis algorithms and can find similar songs even if they are stored in different audio formats. It can find remixes of the same song and even the same song performed by another singer.

Duplicate Songs Finder Supported Audio Formats

This is a truly amazing application and if you want to organize your songs you can’t go wrong with it. Support all the popular audio formats:

• AAC Files (*.aac; *.mp4, *.m4a) – iTunes, iPod, iPhone Audio Files including Apple Lossless audio
• AC3 Files (*.ac3)
• Audio IFF Files (*.aif; *.aiff)
• FLAC Files (*.flac)
• MPEG Audio Files (*.mp3;*.mp2;*.mp1;*.mpa)
• Musepack Files (*.mpc)
• OGG Files (*.ogg)
• WAVE Files (*.wav)
• WavPack Files (*.wv)
• Windows Media Audio Files (*.wma)
• Monkey’s Audio Files (APE)
• True Audio Files (TTA)

Duplicate Songs Finder

Provides all the features that you will ever need in order to organize your audio library. It can also find similar ID3 audio tags and exact duplicates.

The built-in preview makes the process of reviewing the duplicates a breeze. It plays a track continuously from the same position while you navigate between the cloned songs. This way you can easily compare the quality of the files.

Of course, the tool can mark the files with the lower quality automatically in order to remove them easily. The bit rate and other information regarding the audio files is displayed in the duplicates list too.

Download Audio Dedupe duplicate songs finder.

4. Duplicate Photo Finder

Rating: OUTSTANDING

Duplicate Photo Finder is another great dedicated duplicate finder for finding similar images. It can find duplicate images as well as similar photos in any image format. As I already noted, if you are looking to organize your images a dedicated duplicate photo finder is the best choice.

Detect rotated, flipped, resized, or edited pictures. Duplicates will be identified regardless of the modifications that are applied – transformations, color corrections, crops, borders, resized pictures, and added watermarks.

Duplicate Photo Finder

Supports over 340 photo formats, including RAW, HEIC/HEIF, JPG, PNG, GIF, CRW, CR2, CR3, DNG, PSD, WebP, and many more.

The developers claim that there is no limit to the count of the scanned images.  Folders, disks, removable HDD and SSD flash drives, or network shares all can be scanned for identical photos.

Find Similar Photos & Similar EXIF

The tool supports multiple scan modes. It can find similar photos as well as identical images stored in different formats. It can search by file size and EXIF date. and can also find similar EXIF fields. For example, you can search for files with a similar EXIF description. Certainly, you can also find duplicate EXIF fields. If you search for example, for a duplicate CAMERA MODEL EXIF field the tool will list all the photos shot with a particular camera together.

Find Adobe Lightroom Duplicates

In addition to the above, the tool can also find duplicate photos in Adobe Lightroom. This tool is way more advanced than any Adobe Lightroom duplicate finder plugin. It will let you choose a lightroom catalog and find all similar and duplicate photos in it. The common Lightroom duplicate finder plugins can not find similar images. They scan file attributes and in the best case some EXIF flags. In contrast, Duplicate Photo Finder can find both similar photos and similar EXIF info.

Duplicate Photo Finder Verdict

If you are looking to organize your images and get rid of duplicate pictures stored in different formats then you can’t go wrong with this tool. It goes way beyond the capabilities of the common clone removers and will find even edited, retouched, and watermarked photos. Those are features that are not available in any standard duplicate cleaner.

Download Duplicate Photo Finder

5. Duplicate Music Finder

Rating: OUTSTANDING

Duplicate Music Finder is another great entry in our list of the best duplicate file finders. It is a specialized duplicate remover tool that will find copied songs or similar audio files in your music collection. Duplicate songs are difficult to locate and remove manually. in addition to that, audio files are quite large and take up a lot of disk space. Therefore, keeping an organizing audio collection is a must. Having multiple copies of the same song in your playlist is quite annoying. It is equally annoying to have missing files and you might want to read our remove missing songs from iTunes article too.

Duplicate Music Finder Screenshot

Duplicate Music Finder

Things get worse if the songs are stored in different audio formats and not marked with ID3 tags as no common duplicate finder can recognize them. Duplicate Music Finder solves this problem by analyzing the audio tracks and recognizing similar songs. It will “listen” to your audio collection in order to identify twin songs or variations of the same audio file. It can search through various file types including MP3, MP2, MP1, MPA, WAV, OGG, AIFF, AAC, MP4, FLAC, AC3, WavPack (WV), Musepack (MPC), and Windows Media Audio (WMA), iTunes, iPods, etc.

Download Duplicate Music Finder

6. Folder Size

Rating: OUTSTANDING

Folder Size is not exactly a duplicate finder, but if you are trying to organize your disk and free up space, then it will probably be even more useful for you than a duplicate cleaner. The best part of all is that this great tool is free. It has a commercial version, but the features that you will need to clean up your drives are available in the free version.

As you can guess from the name, this tool will show all folder sizes on your computer. Folder sizes are not listed in Windows File Explorer and it is hard to spot the missing disk space. If you wonder why then read this article: Folder Sizes in Windows Explorer

Folder Size Explorer

The tool will not only list the folder and file sizes, but it will also list the largest files and largest folders. It sorts the files and folders from largest to smallest and displays the disk space distribution using neat pie and bar charts.

Folder Size Features

• View all folder sizes in Windows
• View network folder sizes, external HDD, NAS, SAN, and USB drives
• Find the largest folders and largest files
• Print folders
• Print files list
• Export folders to EXCEL
• Export files to EXCEL, XML, or CSV
• Find empty folders
• Find longest paths
• Find the newest or oldest files and folders
• Visualize disk space with neat pie and bar charts
• Save folder and files lists to project files
• Cut, Copy, and Paste files and folders from and to Windows Explorer

Folder Size Verdict

This is a fantastic little tool that is really lightweight and does not use many resources. These are just a few of the major features of the tool. You can free up gigabytes of disk space using only the free version. If you have decided to organize your files then you should definitely try it. This is a tool that I personally use daily. I am sure that you will love it too.

Download Folder Size

7. Duplicate Finder

Rating: OUTSTANDING

Duplicate Finder is another free and robust duplicate cleaner application in our list of the top cloned file cleaners. It covers the most important points of our checklist for choosing clone removal apps.

Duplicate Finder

Duplicate Finder Overview

The tool uses an optimized byte-to-byte comparison algorithm that provides accurate results. The user interface is simple and intuitive, but also includes advanced features for more complex deduplication tasks. Windows 11 is not listed in the supported systems, but our test confirms that the tool is working flawlessly on that Windows version.

The free version is good enough to clean up duplicates, but the similarity modes are available only in the commercial version. Nevertheless, the options for cleaning exact copies are fully functional and are sufficient for most deduplication tasks.

Duplicate Finder Search Modes & User Interface

As I already mentioned, the byte-to-byte and file size modes are available for free. The similarity search modes can find similar file names or similar documents. You can use them in the free version too, but they display only the first five groups of similar files. It is a kind of a teaser, but if you have fewer files you can still use the features.

Scanning for duplicates is simple and easy. Drag-n-Drop the folders that you want to scan in the app, and hit the scan button. The tool will find exact copies by default. As soon as the search is finished the cloned files are listed in the main window. The repeating items are grouped together and details for every file are listed in a neat table.

You can easily review the results and also view every file in the preview panel below the duplicates list. Dupe Finder can preview images, music, video, pdf, Word, Excel, and many other file formats. Do not underestimate the preview capabilities of a tool. Having instant preview saves a tremendous amount of time when reviewing the clones. You see the content of the files instantly rather than opening it with the application that supports that file format.

Duplicate Finder Verdict

As with most tools you can delete, move, or backup the files. In addition to that, you can replace the duplicates with sym-links, Those tiny files are just a few bytes large and point to the “original” file. The application creates those sym-links in the place of the duplicates. Therefore if an application requires the duplicated file that was removed it will still work as if nothing was changed.

Overall Duplicate Finder is a feature-rich clone cleaner that will complete even the most specific task that requires removing repeating data.

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8. Czkawka Duplicate File Finder

Rating: Average

Yes, this name looks horrible to pronounce because it is written in Polish. Czkawka (tch•kav•ka (IPA: [ʈ͡ʂkafka]), “hiccup” in Polish) is a simple, fast and free app to remove unnecessary files from your computer. This is another multi-platform duplicate finder application.

Supported OS

Linux – Ubuntu 22.04+, Fedora 36+, Alpine Linux 3.16+, Debian 12+ and a lot of more
Windows – 7, 8.1, 10, 11
MacOS – 10.15+

Czkafka Duplicate File Finder

As I have already noted, trying to support multiple operating systems simultaneously leads to compromises and issues.

Here are the features as described by the developer.

Features

• Written in memory-safe Rust
• Amazingly fast – due to using more or less advanced algorithms and multithreading
• Free, Open Source without ads
• Multiplatform – works on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, and many more
• Cache support – second and further scans should be much faster than the first one
• CLI frontend – for easy automation
• GUI frontend – uses GTK 4 framework and looks similar to FSlint
• No spying – Czkawka does not have access to the Internet, nor does it collect any user information or statistics
• Multilingual – support multiple languages like Polish, English, and Italian
• Duplicates – Finds duplicates based on the file name, size, or hash
• Empty Folders – Finds empty folders with the help of an advanced algorithm
• Big Files – Finds the provided number of the biggest files in a location
• Empty Files – Looks for empty files across the drive
• Temporary Files – Finds temporary files
• Similar Images – Finds images that are not exactly the same (different resolution, watermarks)
• Similar Videos – Looks for visually similar videos
• Same Music – Searches for music with the same artist, album, etc.
• Invalid Symbolic Links – Shows symbolic links which point to non-existent files/directories
• Broken Files – Finds files that are invalid or corrupted
• Bad Extensions – Lists files whose content does not match their extension

Of course, the tool can not compete with any dedicated duplicate image finder or duplicate music finder, but at least it is free. Follow the link below if you want to give it a try.

Download Czkawka Duplicate File Finder: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

9. Dupe Guru

Rating: Average

dupeGuru is a cross-platform (Linux, OS X, Windows) GUI tool to find duplicate files in a system. I usually do not recommend using cross-platform tools. That is because creating a cross-platform tool leads to a lot of compromises. It is like creating a car that can fly and be a submarine at the same time. You can understand that in the end, it will not do any of the three tasks well.

It’s written mostly in Python 3 and is using multiple GUI toolkits, all using the same core Python code. On OS X, the UI layer is written in Objective-C and Cocoa. On Linux & Windows, it’s written in Python and uses Qt5.

dupeGuru is a tool to find duplicate files on your computer. It can scan either filenames or contents. The fuzzy matching algorithm can find duplicate filenames even when they are not exactly the same.  It can not only find filenames that are the same, but it also finds similar filenames.

dupeGuru Dulicate Remover

Find Duplicate Songs

The app has a special Music mode that can scan tags and shows music-specific information in the duplicate results window. Searching for similar songs is not possible with this tool. It looks only at ID3 tags. If you want to deduplicate audio files then look at the dedicated music duplicate finders in the list above.

Find Duplicate Pictures

According to the author, the program has a special Picture mode that can scan pictures fuzzily. That will let you find pictures that are similar, but not exactly the same. Unfortunately, such a mode did not detect any similar photos. The author does not provide any details on how such a mode works. Obviously, it does not analyze the photos to find similarities. The term fuzzy is usually used to describe a basic method for finding partially matching items. Obviously, dupeGuru is not an exception to this rule.

Please note that those photo and music similarity features are way worse than any dedicated cloned pictures or song removers on this list. If you want to organize photos or music then go for the dedicated tools at the top of our list.

You can tweak the matching engine to find exactly the kind of duplicates you want to find. Change the scanning engine on the preferences page. Those engines have been designed with safety in mind. There is a reference directory system, as well as a grouping system. I did not find how those work though. They will prevent you from deleting files that you don’t mean to delete.

Removing Cloned Files

Do whatever you want with your duplicates. Not only can you delete duplicate files dupeGuru finds, but you can also move or copy them elsewhere. There are also multiple ways to filter and sort your results to easily weed out false duplicates (for low threshold scans).

Supported languages: English, French, German, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Italian, Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian, and Vietnamese.

dupeGuru Verdict

If you want to experiment with this tool then please do it in a test folder. It receives a higher ranking in our top tools to delete duplicates only because it supports multiple operating systems and is free. Overall the tool is very basic and does not provide many options. The scan results are a bit questionable. I would not recommend you to use it if you are working on important tasks.

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10. Duplicate File Finder Plus

Rating: Average

Rating: Average

Rating: Basic

Rating: Poor