I did a search for duplicates with “Size” and “Modified Date” boxes ticked and didn’t get any results, and then did one with only the “Content” box ticked and got several results. This is perhaps the setting I need to use, but, what does “Content” mean?
Thanks.
‘Content’ means exactly what the file(s) contain.
I suspect that your first search failed because the ‘Modified Date’ didn’t match.
Note that when you select Content then Size will also be ticked automatically.
If the content is identical then the size will be identical, so the finder can save time by comparing filesizes first and move on if they are not the same without needing to check the actual contents.
I find that the following settings work best for finding genuine duplicates:
The “Ignore” settings are also important, you don’t usually want to be finding or deleting those files (particularly System Files - the Windows system has duplicates and needs those duplicates to work properly).
Thank you that is very helpful.
I can also add that a photo may be the same image but have a different file name - another reason why I didn’t get any matches.
Remember that CCleaners duplicate finder with the ‘Content’ search will only find exact duplicates.
With photos in particular you may want to also find ‘close’ duplicates, eg, ones that have had red-eye reduction applied, or been cropped, rotated/mirrored, or otherwise altered just slightly in an image editor.
For that you will need another app (and they are much much slower because they have to look for only slight differences. You can usually set how close of a match you want to find.
There are a number of such apps out there, try a few and see which you prefer.
(Personally when looking for duplicate images in photo collections then currently I first use CCleaner to find the exact duplicates and then use Vispics to find the ‘similar’ ones).
