Top 14 Best Duplicate File Finder and Removers in 2024

Rating: OUTSTANDING

Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder

This duplicate finder is the second-best on our list. I should mention though that it is not a general-purpose duplicate remover. It works only on images and can find similar and duplicate photos. The reason to place it second is its unique capability to find similar photos. As I already mentioned finding similar files is not something that common clone deleting tools can do. The previous tool that I reviewed can find similar files, but it is efficient for documents, archives, and text files. You can read in this article which duplicates file finder to choose for finding documents, photos, or audio.

Duplicate Photo Finder

VSDIF is the top application for finding similar and duplicate photos. It can find repeating pictures even if they are stored in different file formats. Edited, rotated, flipped, and converted photos are no issue and will be detected too. This tool is at the top of The Best Duplicate Photo Finder list. It is used by large corporations, medical research laboratories, and professional photographers.

No other duplicate photo finder tool provides this many features and this many supported image formats. Please note that if the format in which your photos are stored is not supported by a similarity search application it will not be able to detect them.

Duplicate Photo Finder Supported Image Formats

Similar Images Search

We have covered this tool in detail in our Lightroom Duplicate Finder article too. If you are a Lightroom fan then you are lucky as this tool can scan your lightroom photos too. There is a dedicated “Scan Lightroom” button on the toolbar that will let you select a lightroom catalog. All the features of the application are available for finding similar and duplicate photos in Lightroom too.

Free download of VS Duplicate Image Finder.

3. Audio Dedupe

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 and 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 an instant preview saves a tremendous amount of time when reviewing the clones. You see the content of the files instantly rather than opening them 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.

Download Duplicate Finder

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 – Look 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 uses 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.

Download dupeGuru

10. Duplicate File Finder Plus

Rating: Average

Duplicate File Finder Plus is another duplicate remover app on our list of the Top duplicate file finders, but it does not impress with anything fancy or better than others. Actually, the tool is rather basic and slow, but it claims to provide an option to compare file content. The developers have not made any effort to hire someone with a good command of English to build their website. This is rather concerning – I personally would not trust my files to be managed by such a tool. Take a look at this paragraph for example:

Compare File Contents, 100% Accurate Result

Compare whether files are the same at the binary level, that is, compare file contents. Since only the file contents are compared, the truly duplicate files must be found, regardless of whether the file names and modification times are consistent, even the extensions are inconsistent (considering the case of deliberately modifying the extensions for safety), they can be found out also.

It is hard to even understand what that text means. Let’s leave aside the website and help files. Those are obviously poorly written and hard to understand. Let’s see what the tool has to offer instead.

Duplicate File Finder Plus Features

The user interface for finding duplicates starts with a screen for selecting the source drives and folders. The interesting thing is that you can add also files – that is not something that we see often. Here you can also include or exclude files or folders.

There are options to search certain file categories – Audio, Video, Documents, Images, Applications, and Compressed. You can exclude or include files by extension too.

Filtering by size is limited to size ranges though and you can not set a range manually. Duplicates can be searched in ranges of Tiny 1 byte – 16 KB, Small 16KB – 1 MB, Medium 1-128MB, and so on.

The only other item in this view is the “Find Now” button that starts the cloned files search.

Duplicate File Finder Plus Results

The duplicate list is really basic and cluttered – see the screenshot below.

Duplicate File Finder Plus

The items are really hard to read and the lack of preview makes the process of reviewing duplicates a real pan. There are not many options and the options to filter the items by size are permanently present in this view again. That is rather strange as such a feature should not be something that is used too often. There are some options to select duplicates automatically on the toolbar.

There are no options to move or copy the duplicates – you can only delete them. You can save the duplicates list to a file though.

Overall the tool is basic and clumsy. To make things worse the price is subscription-based. 30 USD per year for a duplicate finder is a rather steep price. For comparison, the tools at the top of our list cost about the same price for a LIFETIME LICENSE.

Download Duplicate File Finder Plus: https://duplicatefilefinder4pc.com/duplicate-file-finder-plus.htm

11. AntiDupl

Rating: Average

Many computer users have large collections of images in various formats. Certainly, most of these collections have a large number of duplicates. Of course, no one wants duplicates and it is quite normal to want and try to get rid of them. However, if the collection is large enough, doing this manually is very tedious and unproductive work. AntiDupl.NET program will help you automate this process. It can find and display duplicate images in the main graphic formats: JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, EMF, WMF, EXIF, ICON, JP2, PSD, DDS, and TGA. The comparison is based on the contents of the files, so the program can find not only almost identical but similar images. In addition, the program can find images with some types of defects.

AntiDupl

AntiDupl.NET program is free and open-source software. It is simple to use, has high speed and accuracy of work, and supports Russian and English interfaces.

AntiDupl Verdict

This is a rather outdated tool that seems to be discontinued. As you can see from the screenshot the tool is quite basic. It is free, but do not expect any miracles from it. You can try it on your photo library, but use the preview option to inspect the results. Make sure that you are not deleting anything important.

Download AntiDupl

12. CloneSpy

If you have an older system like Windows XP CloneSpy could be good for you. It is a rather outdated and old application. The last update on the website read:

Latest version: 3.43 (released on Saturday 12.10.2019)

You can tell that the tool is quite old by the description which intensively references duplicate files on DVDs and also by the user interface. The product is not intuitive and the options are poorly named. For example “Some scanning properties (See options)”, “Really delete files”, “Override delete selection”, etc. To top that up the user interface is totally different than other duplicate search apps.

CloneSpy User Interface

As mentioned the three list boxes on the left are something that you will not find in another duplicate finder. Those are the Pool1, Pool2, and Checksum (CSC) files. They have options to add/remove folders and files and also to lock the lists. Most likely CSC stands for CloneSpy Checksum and the tool uses checksums to compare files. As I have already mentioned, using checksums is fast, but not reliable. Sometimes completely different files can have the same checksum. It is scary to see a 5 kilobyte file identified as a duplicate of a 5 gigabyte one.

On the right side, you can choose which pools (lists) to compare – Pool 1, Pool 2, Both Pools, Pool 1 + CSC, Pool 2+ CSC. The developer most likely chose those unconventional pools to make it possible to compare folders by adding them to different pools. Next to the pool modes are the scan methods. Below them, you will find the delete options and some scanning options information pulled from the settings.

CloneSpy Duplicates Cleaner

Overall, CloneSpy is an outdated and unconventional duplicate remover, yet it has its pros and cons.

Pros

• Unconventional approach to finding duplicate
• Export duplicates list
• Defer deletion to bat files
• Find duplicates of Hash lists
• Support for ancient operating systems like Windows 2000 and XP
• Free

Cons

• Outdated and unintuitive user interface
• Unreliable matching algorithm that relies on checksums
• Not updated more than 4 years – probably discontinued

While I would not recommend it to novice users it might be useful for certain deduplication needs. Nevertheless, if you decide to give it a try do so on a test folder first. The user interface is beyond unintuitive and it is not clear how features work out of the box. The descriptions are quite ambiguous and you should experiment to understand how features behave.

Download CloneSpy

13. SearchMyFiles

In general, this tool is designed to search for files on a Windows system. The duplicate finding is an additional feature that it provides.

SearchMyFiles is an alternative to the standard “Search For Files And Folders” module of Windows. It allows you to easily search files in your system by wildcard, by last modified/created/last accessed time, by file attributes, file content (text or binary search), and by file size. SearchMyFiles allows you to make a very accurate search that cannot be done with Windows search. For example, You can search all files created in the last 10 minutes with sizes between 500 and 700 bytes.
After you made a search, you can select one or more files, and save the list into a text, HTML, CSV, or XML file, or copy the list to the clipboard.

SearchMyFiles Duplicate Finder

Duplicate Search Mode

Starting from SearchMyFiles v1.35 you can search for duplicate files on your system. In order to use this feature, simply change the search mode in the ‘Search Options’ window to ‘Duplicates Search’.
If you switch to ‘Duplicates Search’ mode, all other search options are still relevant.  SearchMyFiles will search for duplicates according to these settings. For example, if you choose to search for files larger than 100KB, the tool will list only the duplicates that are larger than that size. In fact, it’s highly recommended to narrow down your duplicate search by using the filtering options. If you don’t do it, the duplicate search will be very slow, and it’ll consume a large amount of memory.

Duplicate Number Column

When you are in ‘Duplicates Search’ mode, SearchMyFiles will first scan all files and folders according to your settings. Then it will locate the duplicate files and add them to the files list on the main window. SearchMyFiles automatically marks duplicate files with identical colors. There is also a ‘Duplicate Number’ column, which displays an identical number for each chunk of duplicate files. You can click the ‘Duplicate Number’ column header in order to sort by this column and to easily view the chunks of duplicate files.

Be aware that the duplicate search is done by making a binary comparison of the files of the same size, byte by byte.

This tool is portable and does not require installation. You can just download and run it. It will not modify the registry and it will not write to your system folders.

SearchMyFiles Verdict

Overall it is a simple tool with quite an outdated user interface. It does not include a preview which makes the duplicate files review process really difficult, but you get what you pay for. The tool is absolutely free, so if you need to perform simple deduplication on fewer files it can get the job done. If you need something more advanced you should consider some of the tools at the top of this best duplicate file finders list. There are other free duplicate finder alternatives there that include preview and other handy features. Nevertheless, it is a free tool that is worth mentioning in our list of the best duplicate file finder applications.

Download SearchMyFiles

14. SourceForge Duplicate Files Finder

Rating: Poor

Duplicate Files Finder is another multi-platform free duplicate cleaner. Duplicate Files Finder is a cross-platform application for finding and removing duplicate files by deleting, creating hardlinks, or creating symbolic links. A special algorithm minimizes the amount of data read from the disk, so the program is very fast.

SourceForge Duplicate Files Finder Features

This tool is rather basic and really outdated. As with most such tools, the duplicate removal process starts by selecting folders to be scanned and applying search filters. There are per-folder filtering options, which is nice. You can include or exclude the subfolders in the scan and also filter by file name. In addition to that, you can filter files by minimum and maximum sizes. Options to filter hidden or empty files are available too.

Though there are some features, the user interface is poor and difficult to use. For example, you have to filter file names using wildcards. This is not something that a common user is familiar with. Filtering files by size accepts values only in bytes. If you want to specify sizes that are gigabytes large you have to type huge numbers.

If you are a computer guru in an adventurous mood you may want to play with this tool as it is free. Getting even the basic deduplication task completed using it,  is a challenge.

SourceForge Duplicate Files Finder

SourceForge Duplicate Files Finder 0.8.0 Changes (2008-06-01 )

Download SourceForge Duplicate Files Finder: https://sourceforge.net/projects/doubles/

Best Duplicate File Finder Summary

This is our list of the top tools to remove duplicates. They are sorted from best to worst. Choosing the best duplicate file finder depends on your file deduplication tasks. Nevertheless, you can’t go wrong with any of the first 7 tools above. Certainly, if you download any of the top 3 tools in the list, I am quite sure that they will cover all your requirements.

It is best to keep a well-organized file system that is free of duplicates. Surely, those just waste space and clutter the system by increasing the count of files. Nevertheless, you should be very careful before deleting any files. Therefore, if you are not an expert you should try the tools on a test folder or a test machine first. In addition to that, if yodu are not sure how a feature works, you should read the help file instead of experimenting with your valuable data.

Please share this best duplicate file finder list with your friends – they will thank you as it contains a lot of useful and free tools.