Skip to main content

MacPaw’s Gemini 2 intelligently finds duplicates to free space on your Mac

One of the most frustrating parts about keeping a large photo collection (75,000 and growing), is that I often end up with duplicates over years of maintenance. I’ve spent my fair share cleaning and sorting my library, but it always seems like an album sneaks in with duplicate photos. I’ve been an active user of MacPaw’s Gemini software since its inception, and Gemini 2’s release today has made me fall in love with it all over again. In just the initial scan, Gemini 2 found more files and more places where I could intelligently clear and save space on my Mac.

As a long time fan of Gemini, I was delighted to see the vast improvements Gemini 2 brought into the already great duplicate finding experience. With Gemini 2, it not only hunts for duplicate files, but also similar files. This includes files that are not 100% the same, but similar enough that a difference between them might not be recognizable. For example, imagine you went out on a photo shoot and took a few hundred photos. At the end of the day not all the photos would be exactly the same, but some could be similar enough that it would be okay to delete them.

Gemini 2 helps you find those files so you can quickly sort and delete any unnecessary ones. In my testing, Gemini 2 really did an amazing job here. I pointed it to my Photos library and it found 35 photos from a photo shoot that were all nearly identical, same scene and day, and I was able to quickly go through and delete nearly all of them.

The latest update today is also killer in dealing with your iTunes library. I frequently download remixes of songs, or variants of the same songs, and sometimes duplicates of them sneak into my iTunes library without me knowing. Gemini found those duplicate files, even when their names and dates were completely different, and let me get rid of them without hassle. All in all, I cleaned nearly 2 GB out of my iTunes library alone.

One of my biggest fears in deleting duplicate files is that I always have the possibility of messing something up and not being able to easily place everything back where it belongs. I do daily backups with Time Machine and BackBlaze, but having to go back to those to recover a few files would be a headache. Gemini 2 calms those nerves by having a prominent area to view all the recently deleted files and allowing you to place them back where they originally were.

Gemini 2 is a worthwhile upgrade for anyone who values their storage space, and might be going through a computer spring cleaning. Pair this with MacPaw’s CleanMyMac and you have a veritable suite of storage and computer maintenance software for your Mac.

Current Gemini users can get a lifetime 50% upgrade discount, and if you might have purchased Gemini between April 10th and May 10th, your upgrade is free. Gemini 2 is currently on sale for new users this week (until May 17th) at 50%; it’s available for $9.97 on the official MacPaw store, or for $9.99 from the Mac App Store. Those wanting to try out Gemini before its official release can download a free trial copy from the MacPaw site.

To celebrate its release, currently all MacPaw products are available at a storewide discount of 50% off.

Want a free copy of the Gemini 2?

We’ve got a few product codes to hand out to our readers, and we’d love to get it into your hands! To be added as an entry into the giveaway, do one or more of the following:

  1. Subscribe to our YouTube channel
  2. Follow @9to5Mac and retweet this post from @9to5Mac on Twitter
  3. Like this post on Facebook
  4. +1 this post on Google+
  5. Leave a comment below

Winners will be chosen at the end of the week (Friday, May 13th by 5PM EST).

Update: The giveaway is now closed and the winners have been selected. Check your messages and accounts where you entered to see if you’re a winner. If after a week the winners don’t respond back, newer random winners will be re-selected.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel