PhotoSweeper - Powerful, Adaptable, Affordable One-Time Purchase

In 2025, the world takes more photos in a single day than it used to take in a decade. For most Mac users with an iPhone, this means an ever-increasing Photos library. If you also own a DSLR or use Adobe Lightroom or Capture One and use RAW in your editing process, you can end up with copies all over the place, especially if you make multiple backups. When you eventually get around to bringing order to the chaos, choosing a good duplicate finder is a must.

Some popular choices include:

• Power Photos - $39.95 for a full suite of tools
• Czkawka - free
• Digikam - free
• DiskDrill - freemium
• dupeGuru - free
• Zero Duplicates - $19.99 lifetime purchase
• Gemini - $19.99 a year or Setapp

The app I keep coming back to is PhotoSweeper by Overmacs, an app that's been under continuous development since 2011. Version 5 was released in the summer of 2025 and new features were added as recently as November. It's a $15 one-time purchase with free updates. A free trial is available, but the actual deletion of files is limited.

Features I Like

• Can find exact duplicates, similar photos, and photos in a user-definable series
• Automatic marking based on up to 30 criteria - size, date, format, dimensions, album, etc.
• Safe deletion - In Apple Photos, duplicates are moved to a special folder. In Lightroom, they are marked as rejected. In Capture One, they go in the app's trash, and if you scan folders in your Mac's file system, the duplicates go to the system trash.
• Works anywhere - On your hard drive, external drives, network drives, Lightroom, Capture One, Apple Photos
• Preview mode - Makes it easy to review files before removal. Good keyboard support.
• Fast and reliable - I bought my DSLR in 2014, and I took about 20K photos that year. PhotoSweeper didn't hesitate, choke, or hang up when scanning that entire folder.
• Supports multiple formats - It can read all the usual photo types plus HEIC, DNG, and RAW

Caveats

• Not a full photo management app - doesn't have tagging, face recognition, or metadata management beyond deduplication
• Results depend on threshold settings - There are a lot of configurable options, and the way that you set them controls the results you get. The learning curve isn't super steep, but it is there.
• Previous versions were a bit clunky - Version 5 solved this for me, and it feels like a native app to me, but some people have a super-strict definition of that, so YMMV.

Recommendation

If you need a straightforward tool to streamline a large Mac photo library and are open to adjusting settings instead of relying solely on AI, PhotoSweeper gets the job done well. It doesn't aim to be a complete photo management suite like Luminar or Lightroom, focusing instead on its specific niche.