The same photos are on both drives. Which ones?

How it decides two files are duplicates

By reading them. Three tests run in order, cheapest first — a file only reaches the next test if it passed the one before, which is why a multi-terabyte scan finishes at all.

1. TEST 01Size

   Files of different sizes cannot be identical, so they never get read. This is what removes almost everything.

2. TEST 02Partial fingerprint

   The first and last megabyte of each surviving file are hashed. Two files that differ anywhere near their head or tail are separated here without reading the middle.

3. TEST 03Full MD5 of the entire file

   Whatever is left is read end to end. Only a full-content match is reported as a duplicate — not a matching name, not a matching timestamp, not a matching size.

Nothing is deleted

Flagged files are moved to a quarantine folder on the same drive, never erased. The 24-hour hold exists because the moment you regret a cleanup is usually the moment after it finishes.

• Re-checked at the moment it moves On cross-folder and cross-drive matches, each flagged file is hashed against the copy you're keeping right as you click quarantine — not just when the scan ran. If a file changed in between, it is skipped and named.
• The safety net costs no disk space Quarantine moves files, it does not copy them — so holding them for 24 hours uses no additional space on your drive. The trade is the honest one: the space isn't reclaimed either until you permanently delete. You get the undo window for free, and choose when to cash in the space.
• Restore never guesses If a file's original location is on a drive that isn't connected, the app names that location, leaves the file safely in quarantine, and offers to continue with the rest. It will not redirect anything somewhere arbitrary.
• Nothing leaves quarantine until its copy has landed Each file is written in full first; the quarantine record clears only once the file is safely home. An interrupted restore cannot leave a half-written file in your archive.
• System and catalog working folders are never scanned Windows, Program Files, the Recycle Bin, Adobe Premiere Pro's working folders, and Lightroom's .lrdata and .cache directories are excluded outright. You can add your own exclusions and save them as reusable profiles.
• Permanent delete and restore are never locked Even without a licence, and even after a refund, you can always restore your own files or empty quarantine yourself. Your files are not held hostage by the software that moved them.

What it doesn't do

A duplicate finder is asking you to trust it with your archive. Here is where the tool stops, stated plainly, so nothing on this page is a surprise after you buy.

• It doesn't read your Lightroom or Capture One catalog Lightroom's working folders are excluded from scanning, but the app has no knowledge of which photos are catalogued. If you quarantine a photo Lightroom has catalogued, Lightroom will show it as missing until you restore it — which takes one click, within the 24-hour hold or after. Catalog awareness is planned, not shipped. What this means for your catalog in practice →
• It doesn't guess which folder is the camera dump You add the folders to compare, in the order you want them ranked — the copy in the first-listed folder is the one kept. That's a deliberate reversal of an earlier version that tried to detect dump folders by naming convention and silently found nothing when your names didn't match its expectations.
• Cross-folder RAW+JPG pairing tolerates resizing, not heavy cropping Pairing a RAW with its exported JPG in a different folder uses a perceptual hash with an adjustable threshold, which handles resized and re-compressed exports well. A significantly cropped export may hash differently enough to be missed. Every other kind of duplicate detection in the app is full-content matching only.
• It only looks at photo, video and audio files RAW photos, exported JPGs, .MOV and .MP4 video, and GoPro .WAV audio. Documents, archives, installers and everything else on the drive are ignored, so this is not a general-purpose duplicate file cleaner — it is built for the one archive where a wrong deletion is unrecoverable.
• Windows only, and not code-signed yet Windows 10 and 11. There is no macOS or Linux build. The installer isn't code-signed, so Windows will call the publisher unknown — the download page publishes the installer's SHA-256 fingerprint and walks through exactly what you'll see.

What it handles

Formats are matched by content, so anything listed here is compared the same way as everything else.

Each category is a separate switch in the app, so you can scan RAWs alone on one pass and video alone on another — useful when a full pass over a multi-terabyte drive would run overnight.

Version

1.5

Runs on

Windows 10 / 11

Licence

One-time purchase

After activation

Works offline

Built for archives that don't fit on one drive

This was written to clean up a 25 TB photo and video archive spread across external drives, and the scanning behaviour follows from that.

• Scans survive being interrupted Progress is checkpointed at phase boundaries. Pause a multi-hour scan and resume later: everything already finished stays finished, and only the phase you were in the middle of runs again.
• You can watch it work, in both directions Live per-file progress with running byte totals during both quarantine and restore, plus an up-front note that a greyed-out window means Windows is busy, not crashed. On a job this size, that distinction matters.
• The recoverable figure is arithmetic, not an estimate Move files out and back and the number returns to where it started. In a whole-library test, 236 files across 35 GB were quarantined and restored with every file exact to the byte, and the Storage Map agreed with the headline figure at every checkpoint.
• Same filename on three drives is handled Identical basenames from different drives get unique names in quarantine and each keeps its own recorded origin, so a multi-drive cleanup can be undone file by file without ambiguity.

Questions