SearchForDuplicates

Files on your computer, especially multimedia items, and pictures, can easily be found in multiple places. This is the result of a poor folder management, which can end up taking a lot of disk space for no reason. Luckily, you can use specialized applications like SearchForDuplicates in order to scan your PC for similar, or identical files, and have them removed at the press of a button.

As far as the visuals go, the application stores all of its features in a classic window frame, which doesn’t make accommodation much of a hassle. What’s more, pressing a button before its function can be initiated, or hovering the cursor over items brings up tooltips for helpful info.

Most of the space is taken up by the list of detected files, with an additional panel for one, or more locations to search in. Subfolders are included as well, and you have the possibility to search for a specific file type, or name. Detected items can also be saved to file in a TXT list, in case you want to analyze it first, or keep a log of events.

The process usually goes fast, but this mostly depends on the target drive, its size, and complexity. Before conversion starts, you have the possibility to quickly look for music, image, videos, documents, or compressed files, to narrow down results.

When detected, files are shown in a table along with info like name, last modified data, size, CRC checksum, and location. Filtering according to these column headers is not possible, but this is mostly because original, and duplicates are differentiated through colors, in pairs.

You’re free to interact with a file in the same way you would, with all options your explorer context menu holds. Corresponding properties can also be brought up. It’s completely up to you to decide which files to remove, with options to quickly select all duplicates, or only those with the same name.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that SearchForDuplicates is a powerful cleaning utility you might want to use every now and then. It gets the job done in the blink of an eye, with multiple filters to apply, sources to look in, and easy selection of all duplicates to get them ready for removal.