DupeCleaner

Find your duplicate files in minutes — and delete them safely!

About | Modes | Technologies | Requirements | Starting | Scripts | License

🎯 About

Tired of duplicate files eating your disk? 😩 Same photo saved three times, the same song in two folders, installers you forgot you downloaded? Say no more! 💪

DupeCleaner finds the duplicates hiding on your computer — and helps you get rid of them safely. ✨ It's a cross-platform GUI tool for Linux, macOS, and Windows, written mostly in Python 3 with a Qt5 interface. It's built for real libraries — tens of thousands of photos and songs — not a demo folder.

This is my own edition of dupeGuru by Hardcoded Software, with the delete engine hardened: files are re-checked before they're deleted, big files are matched on their full contents (not just samples), and photo matching handles rotated phone photos. 🚀

Don't let duplicates pile up. Give it a try and see how fast your library gets clean! 😉

🔍 Modes

• Standard mode — scans filenames or file contents. The filename scan uses fuzzy matching, so it finds duplicates even when the names aren't exactly the same.
• Music mode 🎵 — scans audio tags and shows music-specific info (artist, album, bitrate, …) in the results, so you can tell versions apart.
• Picture mode 🖼️ — scans pictures fuzzily, so it finds photos that are similar but not exactly the same: different sizes, recompressed copies, rotated shots.

✨ Why use it

• Fast. ⚡ The fuzzy matching engine finds duplicates in minutes, even across a big library.
• Customizable. 🛠️ Tweak the matching engine to find exactly the kind of duplicates you want. Every scanning setting is listed on the Preference page of the help file.
• Safe. 🔒 The reference-directory system and the grouping system keep you from deleting files you didn't mean to delete. And before anything is deleted, the file is re-checked to make sure it hasn't changed since the scan.
• Flexible. 🔀 Delete duplicates, or move or copy them elsewhere instead. Filter and sort the results to weed out false positives, especially on low-threshold scans.

🗺️ Roadmap

Planned features, roughly in priority order. Ideas welcome — open an issue to suggest one.

• Faster scans — parallel hashing for Standard mode and parallel photo preparation for Picture mode. (in progress)
• NAS-aware scanning — detect network volumes and cap parallel workers, so scans over a NAS don't thrash. (next, after faster scans)
• macOS packages as single items — .app bundles and other packages are fingerprinted as a whole instead of scanning every file inside them. (next)
• Big Files finder — list the largest files in a location. (easy)
• Empty Files finder — list zero-byte files. (easy)
• Empty Folders finder — list folders that are empty, including ones that only contain empty folders. (easy)
• Bad Extensions checker — flag files whose contents don't match their extension. (medium)
• Broken Files finder — flag photos and audio that fail to decode. (medium)
• Folder priority — give a folder a priority so its files are always kept over duplicates elsewhere. (medium)
• File-type filter per scan — scan only certain file types, or exclude some. (medium)
• Operation History — keep a record of past cleanups: what was deleted and how much space came back. (easy-medium)
• Similar Videos — find near-duplicate videos by comparing frames. (hard — needs ffmpeg)

🌍 Languages

English, French, German, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Italian, Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian Portuguese, Vietnamese.

🚀 Main Technologies

See more

• PyQt5 — the Qt5 UI toolkit
• xxhash — fast file hashing
• mutagen — audio tag reading for Music mode
• Send2Trash — safe deletion to the recycle bin

✅ Requirements

Before starting 🏁, make sure you have Python 3.7+ and PyQt5 installed on your system.

On Linux you also need the system packages to build: python3-pyqt5, pyqt5-dev-tools (on some systems), python3-venv, python3-dev, build-essential. To create packages you also need python3-setuptools and debhelper.

⬇️ Download

Don't want to build it yourself? GitHub Actions builds the macOS and Windows apps on every push to master — grab the latest from the Build app workflow (dupecleaner-macos and dupecleaner-windows artifacts).

The Mac app is unsigned, so open it with right-click → Open the first time.

🏁 Starting

# Clone this project
$ git clone https://github.com/Salcedoandrew/DupeCleaner
$ cd DupeCleaner

# Set up a virtual environment
$ python3 -m venv --system-site-packages ./env
$ source ./env/bin/activate

# Install dependencies
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

# Build and run
$ python build.py
$ python run.py

Or build and run in one go with Make:

$ make && make run

For Windows instructions see the Windows Instructions. For macOS instructions (Qt version) see the macOS Instructions.

🎮 Scripts

• make / make run: builds the app and runs it;
• python build.py --modules: builds the C extensions;
• python build.py --loc: builds the translations;
• python build.py --doc: builds the help files;
• python package.py: packages the app (macOS .app, Windows installer, Debian/Arch package — install requirements-extra.txt first);
• pytest core hscommon: runs the test suite (install requirements-extra.txt first, or run tox).

📝 License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License. For more details, please refer to the LICENSE file.

Made with ❤️ by Andrew Salcedo

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