When I first came across Duplicate Photo Cleaner, I assumed it would only identify 100% similar photos by comparing photos pixel-by-pixel. It does indeed do that, but also can identify photos that are only similar (not 100% identical), and assigns a % rating for just how similar they are (then allows you to delete duplicate or similar images in 1 click). If the software works as intended, this would be quite helpful in an age where phones and cameras can usually hold thousands of photos, and it’s standard practice to take many photos of something to get a good shot.
In this Duplicate Photo Cleaner review, I’ll download and test the software and share my thoughts on it, with the goal of helping you decide if it’s worth paying for. Click here to skip to my verdict on how good Duplicate Photo Cleaner is or keep reading for the full review.
Installing Duplicate Photo Cleaner
Got to https://www.duplicatephotocleaner.com and click the “DOWNLOAD for Windows” or “DOWNLOAD for Mac” button. This will start the installer download automatically (52.6MB for Windows at the time of writing). It’s a very quick and simple install process, with no options to consider:
Using Duplicate Photo Cleaner
When you open the software for the first time, you’ll see this (click to enlarge):
I suppose it’s not a big deal, but my first impressions of this software is that it’s a bit goofy. The layout and GUI feels like something from 10 years ago and the window was huge on my laptop.
But as for whether the software actually works or not, I ran a simple test by taking 11 extremely similar photos of my laptop screen as I was writing this post, then fed them into Duplicate Photo Cleaner. With just 11 files, the scan was done very quickly:
In truth all 11 photos I tested here ought to have been considered similar, but Duplicate Photo Cleaner said just 8 were similar. Here are the thumbnails of the photos I tried:
I suppose that while to a human eye these images are all obviously similar, to a computer, it’s not at all obvious, since as far as the computer is concerned every single pixel is different from picture to picture. I don’t know what kind of algorithm Duplicate Photo Cleaner uses to identify what pictures are similar, but it does a reasonable job.
Then you can delete duplicate or similar images (in “one click” as advertised):
By the way, when you get to the results screen you can probably compare images just fine with the thumbnails (which can be adjusted), but if you change the View in the top-left to as Tree, you can get larger images and some more information about them (such as the size, their location and last modified date):
When it comes to then selecting images to be deleted or moved, the default selection option is all duplicates, but you have a few other options as well:
And that’s basically the core functionality of Duplicate Photo Cleaner. As you can see in the screenshot of its dashboard, there are a few options to have a similarity threshold, minimum/maximum file size and so on, but other than that the screens above are mostly the whole software.
Duplicate Photo Cleaner: free vs paid
The free version of Duplicate Photo Cleaner only allows you to delete 10 images before you have to upgrade. The paid version allows you to delete an unlimited number of images, but it’s a little pricey at $39.95 for 1 year for 1 computer (though you get major discounts if you need licenses for more than 1 computer).
Is Duplicate Photo Cleaner any good?
Duplicate Photo Cleaner does a good job of identifying duplicate images, and if you have thousands of photos on your device that you want to clean up, I recommend giving it a try. Just know that 1) you’ll have to pay $40 to upgrade if you want to delete 10+ images (so don’t bother with it if you’re not willing to pay any money) and b) the software isn’t 100% perfect at identifying duplicates.
