How to find and delete similar photos on Mac

A practical guide from the makers of Clear Storage — Disk Visualizer

Take five photos of the same scene to be safe, keep all five forever — everyone does it, and it's why Photos libraries balloon. These shots aren't duplicates in the technical sense: every file is unique, so exact-match tools see nothing. Finding them takes a different kind of detection.

Exact duplicates vs similar photos

• Exact duplicate: the same file content twice — an import that ran twice, a copied album. Byte-for-byte identical.
• Similar photo: different files, near-identical picture — burst frames, retakes, the same sunset at three exposures. Only visual analysis can group these.

How perceptual analysis works (short version)

Instead of comparing file bytes, perceptual analysis compares what the images look like — reducing each photo to a compact visual signature and grouping photos whose signatures are close. Two frames shot a second apart land in the same group even though their files differ completely.

Running it on your library

1. In Clear Storage, run a scan that includes your Photos library. Both exact duplicates and visually similar groups are detected — analysis happens entirely on your Mac.
2. Open the Similar Photos results. Each group shows its shots side by side, with the original flagged.
3. Pick the keeper per group — usually the sharpest or best-framed — and mark the rest for removal.
4. Review the selection, clean up, and check the freed total in history.

How aggressive should you be?

A practical rule: keep one frame per moment. If two shots would be interchangeable in an album, one of them is storage, not memory. But skip artistic series where the variations are the point — similarity detection finds candidates; the judgment stays yours, which is why review-before-delete matters.