One of the biggest problems photographers face regularly is running out of disk space. Whether it be on your iPhone or your PC or Mac. Photos can consume massive amounts of storage as they collect over time.

One of the issues I recently experienced was a series of lost duplicate folders of photos. You see, when I was setting my backup software, I accidentally made an error in the configuration. Although I quickly corrected it, what I didn’t realize was that the backup software had already copied quite a few folders to the incorrect location.

Since this location was outside of my backup path or main photo path it went unnoticed. These redundant folders were needlessly consuming gigabytes of storage.

Mylio to the rescue

Luckily, a new feature built into Mylio stepped in to help free up that precious space. In case you are not familiar with Mylio, it is a photo manager and syncing software that allows you to see your entire photo collection from anywhere.

In this last update, Mylio has introduced a de-duplicate feature. Just as the name suggests, it seeks out and locates duplicate photos and folders of photos.

Find duplicates

Once Mylio (a free download) is installed and you have let it import the photo directory (or directories) on your computer simply go to Organize > Find Duplicates. You can also find this feature in the Dashboard on the Actions tab.

Mylio will then scan your entire photo library searching for duplicates. It will then present them to you in a clear manner, showing you side by side the photo and where each duplicate is located. There is a litany of different filters to allow you to narrow down your duplicate search as well. Some of these include folders, time, date, file type and many others.

Intelligent removal

Mylio will even make a recommendation on which version of the photo you should keep. It uses many different criteria, including if the file was edited, the rating, if it was flagged, labeled, has XMP data and more. Using this criterion, you can make the best choice as to which photos to remove, greatly reducing the chance you delete something you needed by mistake.

Once you have made your decision, Mylio can delete the duplicate files or move them to a new directory for further review prior to deletion.

It is a really smart way of not only saving significant hard drive space but doing so in a way that minimizes any risk of deleting needed files. Check out Mylio here.