14 DAY TRIAL // As you store more data on your drives, you may not realize how many of your photos, movies, songs, or documents have duplicates that take up space unnecessarily.
Duplicates Expert comes to the rescue by helping you to locate the duplicate files and clean up your drives through simple operations that should be straightforward even for the most inexperienced users.
Feature-rich application that impresses with its polished design
Now, of course, this is hardly the first tool of its kind ever to be created. Quite the contrary, the market seems to be saturated with apps that offer similar functions. Duplicates Expert’s impressive build quality makes it stand out, however, highlighting the importance of attention to detail during the development process.
Duplicates Expert includes virtually every feature that could be expected from a duplicate cleaning tool, and they are all packed into a modern-looking, streamlined interface. As a result, the app is very easy-to-use even for people who are just learning their way around a Mac.
Visually, Duplicates Expert is particularly impressive, as all the gathered data is displayed in an intuitive manner. Navigating through the scan results could not be easier, as files are divided depending on their type, and you can sort them based on name, size, identical item count or path.
Finding and removing duplicate files is made simple with this intuitive app
When you first launch the application, you are greeted by a simple window in which you can drop the folders you want to scan. Duplicates Expert uses a search and comparison algorithm that processes data quickly and does not use an excessive amount of resources. During our tests, a folder 11 GB in size, containing over 1600 files, was scanned in under a minute while putting only a moderate load on the system’s CPU.
Sadly though, you cannot customize the comparison parameters, to determine if the app should, for example, check file names, content or creation dates. If you want to modify the scanning settings, however, it is possible to choose which files, folders or extensions should be skipped. Moreover, you can specify the minimal file size, to avoid including items that would not free up a significant amount of space.
Clear and varied graphical data representations give you all the information you need at a glance
Duplicates Expert provides a straightforward and intuitive depiction of the gathered data. You can view an interactive bar or pie chart that gives you an idea of how many images, videos, songs, documents, archives, folders or other items have unnecessary copies.
Not only that, but it provides cleanup hints that could help inexperienced users decide which operations are likely to free up the most disk space. All you need to do is click on one of them to have the tool perform the suggested action automatically.
However, most people will probably wish to choose the items they want to remove manually, and this takes us to the next important step: deciding how duplicate files should be handled.
You can view all the detected objects in a single window, but it may be difficult to find the most relevant ones in this manner. It is much easier to simply click one of the bars or pie chart sections to have the app display various file types separately, making it much easier to sort through all the duplicates.
User-friendly tool that can automatically choose which files need to be removed
At this point, you could verify each entry yourself to decide which copies need to be deleted, but you can also take advantage of Duplicates Expert’s ‘Auto Select’ function. As its name suggests, it automatically chooses the items that will be removed. By playing around with the app’s more advanced settings, you can define certain folders that should always take priority.
Furthermore, you can specify if the oldest or newest versions of a file are disposable, or analyze each of them yourself and perform changes to ensure no mistakes are made. If the worst should happen, however, you need not fret, as the files are initially moved to the Trash folder, although the app can skip this step if you so choose.
Compare directories to determine which of them are unnecessary
Duplicates Expert also impresses through its handling of similar folders. These are directories that contain a certain number of identical files, but unique items as well. If you select one of them, the app displays a list of all the other relevant folders, in order of similarity. What’s more, you can view a helpful Venn diagram that graphically depicts the amount of shared content between the two directories.
However, you may not have time to sort through all the duplicates in one session, and this is where a save function would have been useful. As it stands, you cannot export the search results and continue the removal process when launching the application again at a later date.
The Good
It can help you remove files that are taking up valuable disk space unnecessarily, without having to go through complicated menus or fiddle with advanced settings. A scan can be performed with a couple of mouse clicks, and the application offers an accessible graphical representation of the results.
The Bad
Additionally, the possibility to preserve search results between sessions would be great for extensive cleaning tasks: you could continue the sifting of the files at a later date, without having to perform the same scan more than once. Granted, this works only if your drive’s content does not change in the meantime.
