Duplicate Detective 2 4+

This app simply does not work. I give it a folder with at least two duplicate songs, literaly copy past them into another nested folder and it can not find the duplicate. Amazingly bad. Waste of my money.

My main reason for getting this was to remove duplicate photos. The interface is nice and it’s very easy to scan a directory and find duplicate files and remove them. The issue I’m having is that after several attempts, the duplicates seem to come right back. I have a feeling the issue is with Apple Photos and the fact that the auto select feature in this application always selects the Photos library version of the file and not the original version of the file. Photos wants a copy of the file in its library, so auto selecting that and deleting it just causes Photos to re-copy the original into the library and I’m right back at square one. I wish you could change the preference or train it to select the right version or keep the preferred version. With many thousands of photos, I can’t manually go through and select them one at a time so auto-slect is the only option. If you are not using Apple Photos, or need to scan and remove duplicates of different kinds of files, this app seems to work pretty well, but this Photos issue is not acceptable. Also, this seems to only remove exact duplicates, no way to remove very close versions of the same photo that I can find.

First, I have to agree that the photo duplicate remover process is clunky. All I do I make a screen print of the instruction panel, and access on the DT as I go through the process. IT WORKS!

Frankly, I consider this a real bargain for the power provided.

Today, I searched for duplicates in two HDs and four directories. Perfection. I wanted to keep the good stuff in my master external drive. That required me to manually select some duplicates. Not hard. Simply select ALL, and let the down button scream through, and stop when you see selection change needed. You have to back up a couple of files that flew by. Make change and forge ahead.

I have used a number of similar Mac products over the years and this is one of the top two. Most, simply don't dive through the morass of subdirectories. All too often you get choices that are not true duplicates! DD-2 found duplicates that were buried in sub-directories.

Did experience one problem. Asked for an assist from vendor and had a cogent response within an hour. Followed up with a screen image of the problem. Got a workaround, and it is being referred to developers.