As you will come to understand in the weeks which follow, it’s clean up time! Everywhere. Tuffer’s gone, so the Bunkhouse and Storeroom need a thorough going over and put back together again. Daughter C and the J-Man are moving out but not really which is to say they will be taking the stuff they need and ceding to me what remains, including books. Cleaning The Apartment! Yay!! And then there’s the Big House. And in my more ambitious brain states, the garage and workshop. Probably close to 8000 square feet.

I look forward to it. I don’t mind this sort of homemaking. Fresh start & all that. So naturally, my first priority is cleaning up my computer!

Bottom line. I found an app that searches for and removes duplicate photos, for me to the tune of about 6 Gigs. There is a learning curve– an app is a tool and like the Gerber Shard that the J-Man gave me for Christmas, most tools can be used in a variety of ways to help one accomplish a task. So it is with Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro, reg. $18.99 on sale for $0.99 in the App Store. Without reservation, and having used it for several days, it’s well worth the regular price.

At the most basic level, you find the folder in which you want to search for duplicates, and specify what counts as a duplicate. Adjusting the (flower and butterfly) Matching level, along with the Time interval level will allow you to eliminate literally hundreds of nearly identical photos snapped one right after the other.

When the search is complete, you simply select the one or more photos that you wish to delete. Sounds easy and it is but there are smarter ways to use this tool.

At first pass, and in this folder alone, it scanned over 22,000 photos and found thousands that were duplicates in hundreds of groups. A group is a batch of potentially duplicate photos. That’s a lot of selections to make. Note that when you click on a photo, its path is given below, and in the sidebar. See my first group above. I have a zillion photos taken on the trail cam. Sure, they are nearly duplicates, but part of the fun of the trail cam is comparing photos taken 10 seconds apart. Conveniently, the app allows you to specify folders as exceptions. So I went back, opened preferences, found and made exceptions all of my trail cam folders. That eliminated hundreds if not thousands of photographs to compare.

Rescanning and paying attention to a photos location, I also discovered many folders that existed both where they belonged, and as subfolders where they did not belong. ?? In this case, I could use Finder to locate the subfolder and delete it wholesale.

Scanning Photos Library (what used to be iPhotos, I think) uses an odd protocol to delete, but the app walks you through it step-by-step.

All told, it took me about 3-4 hours spread out over three days to free up over 6 Gigs on my hard drive. I know, I know. Six Gigs may not seem like much to you, but to us Country Mice, it’s a lot. A Gig saved is a Gig earned & all.