How to find duplicate photos on your Mac

Duplicates rarely arrive as exact copies. A burst leaves 10 near-identical frames. An edit produces a second file next to the original. An export for Instagram creates a resized JPEG of a HEIC. A backup of a backup copies the whole set once more onto another drive.

A byte-level duplicate finder only matches files that are identical bit for bit, so it misses the edit, the export and the burst. PhotoCore takes the other route: it compares what the images look like, using 768-dimension embeddings computed on your Mac. That finds the whole visual family of a photo, whatever the filename, format or file size.

Point PhotoCore at the folders where the copies live: your Pictures folder, an external drive, a NAS share. Indexing runs once, in place and read-only. No import, no moved files, no duplicates created by the tool that is supposed to remove them.

PhotoCore reads JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP, GIF and BMP, and stores compact embeddings in a local SQLite database. After that, a search across 10,000 photos takes under 50ms on Apple Silicon.

Select any photo in your library and run a similar-photo search. PhotoCore returns the images closest to it in visual content, ranked by similarity.

The reference does not have to be indexed. Drag and drop any image onto PhotoCore, a file from the Desktop, a download, a shot someone sent you, and the search runs against your whole index. That answers the classic question: do I already have this photo somewhere?

One slider controls how strict the match is, and it maps to the three duplicate types you actually meet:

• Tight: near-identical frames, exact copies, burst shots taken fractions of a second apart
• Middle: edited copies and exports, cropped, color-graded or resized versions of the same shot
• Loose: the same scene shot twice, even years apart with different cameras and light

Start tight to clear the obvious copies, then loosen the slider to surface the rest of the family.

The results sit next to each other in one view, so you can compare frames directly instead of jumping between folders. Each result shows where the file lives, which matters when one copy is on your Mac and the other is on a backup drive.

Review is the safety net. PhotoCore proposes candidates; you confirm which ones are actual duplicates. False neighbors, like two different plates of pasta, are easy to spot at a glance and skip.

Within a group of near-duplicates, sort by the on-device quality score to push the sharpest, best-exposed frame to the top. Keep the winner, then delete or move the rest yourself in Finder. PhotoCore never removes a file on its own.

The same scoring drives the whole culling workflow. The photo culling feature page covers the quality filter and sorting in detail, and the guide on selecting the best photo from a burst walks through the keep-one-drop-nine case step by step.