MacDuplicate Finders

Duplicate File Finder and OnlyOne X are the two free, general-purpose entries, and both gate their most useful trick behind an unpriced Pro upgrade. Duplicate File Finder, from Nektony, is the more established of the two — Apple-notarized, and a 10M+-download, 4.6-star track record per the developer’s own site — with a free tier that already does real work: byte-for-byte SHA comparison across any disk, external drive, or Photos/Music library. Its Pro in-app purchase adds what power users ask for most: removing duplicate folders (not just files), merging similar folders, and Auto Select rules for bulk cleanup, though the exact Pro price isn’t listed as a static number anywhere Nektony publishes. OnlyOne X, from the much smaller Opproa Tech Studio, is the bare-bones version of the same idea — free Scan & Clean with configurable size and file-type filters, one-click “Smart check” selection reserved for an equally unpriced Pro upgrade, and a developer web presence thin enough to be a single Google Sites page rather than a marketing site, though the Mac App Store listing itself is real and was updated as recently as 2025.

Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro and PhotoSweeper both narrow the job to photos specifically, and both are one-time purchases, but they solve different problems. Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro, from Systweak Software, is the cheaper and more standalone of the two at $4.99 — a real-time adjustable matching-level slider re-groups results without a rescan, and it can scan a connected Google Drive account alongside local and external drives, not just files already on your Mac. (Worth double-checking the listing: Systweak also publishes a separately named “Photos Duplicate Cleaner,” a different app.) PhotoSweeper, at $14.99, is the library-aware option instead of the cloud-aware one — it plugs directly into Apple Photos, Lightroom Classic, and Capture One, so removing a duplicate updates the original library correctly (marked “Rejected” in Lightroom, for instance) rather than just deleting a stray file, and its AI Photo Scoring rates burst-shot quality to help auto-pick the keeper.

Gemini 2 is the one subscription in this section, and the one with by far the deepest press record — TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, Macworld, iMore, and MacStories have all covered it, and it won a Red Dot Award for UI design. MacPaw’s app finds both exact duplicates and near-duplicate “similars” useful for photo bursts or re-ripped music, with a Smart Select algorithm the company says learns your keep-or-delete habits over time, plus a background Duplicates Monitor that flags new copies as they appear rather than waiting for a manual rescan. It’s distributed directly from MacPaw’s own site rather than the Mac App Store, and priced as a subscription starting at $1.95/mo instead of a one-time fee — the only listing here billed that way.