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For Mac ยท Apple silicon

Sift finds the doubles.

Sift finds duplicate and look-alike photos across your whole archive, RAW included. It picks the best copy to keep, tells you why, and moves the rest somewhere you can undo. It never deletes anything on its own.

252.8 MBsafely reclaimable in the demo archive
69duplicate groups from 271 files
3.5 sto fingerprint them all, Vision on
Sift's overview: 252.8 MB safely reclaimable, counts of exact copies, same shots and look-alikes, quick cleanups and biggest wins

Review thousands of groups without thousands of clicks

Every group lands in a native Mac table you can sort by any column. Shift-click ranges, select everything Sift marked High Confidence, and clear it with one keystroke. Double-click a row to compare.

The All Duplicate Groups table with type, keeper, space to reclaim, confidence, folders and capture date
All groups. The keeper, what it would remove, how sure Sift is, and which folders the copies live in.

Side by side, with the reasons spelled out

Each card shows the file's format, size, sharpness and capture time, and why Sift chose it. Use the arrow keys to step through, K to keep, X to remove, or ask Claude for a second opinion on a hard group.

Comparing a TIFF master with its JPEG twin, a renamed backup copy and an edited export
Same shot. The TIFF master stays. Its JPEG twin, a renamed backup and a graded export are marked for removal.
Comparing burst frames, with near-identical frames marked for removal
Look-alikes. Burst frames a quarter second apart. Only the near-identical ones are pre-marked; the rest wait for you.
Choosing the keeper

Rules are applied in this order. RAW always wins: its weight outranks resolution, sharpness and exposure combined, and a RAW is never removed in favor of its JPEG.

KEEPERREMOVEREVIEW
  1. Protected folders
  2. Your preferred folders
  3. RAW over TIFF over HEIC over JPEG
  4. Resolution
  5. Sharpness
  6. An original name rather than "copy"
  7. The oldest file

Clean a whole folder pattern at once

Duplicates are grouped by the folders they span, so you can make one decision for all of them, like "keep Photography, move the OneDrive copies".

Folder Patterns: duplicates grouped by the folder pairs they span, with sizes and Folder Rule buttons
Folder patterns. How much each pair of folders shares, and a Folder Rule to clear it.
The Look-alikes table
Look-alikes. Bursts and near-identical frames, sorted by space to reclaim.

What it finds

A matching name is never enough on its own. The pixels have to match too, and exact copies are compared byte for byte before anything moves.

Exact copies

Identical bytes, even after a rename or a move.

Same shot

Same camera, same instant to the sub-second: RAW+JPEG, CR2 to DNG, exports.

Filename families

IMG_1234 copy, IMG_1234(1), IMG_1234_ARW.dng.

Look-alikes

Bursts and near-identical frames, and re-encoded videos.

Library health

Blurry shots, wrong extensions, unreadable files.

Recognized on-device by Apple Vision
ScreenshotsiOS screenshot tags, file names, or the classifier
ReceiptsTotals, tax and card lines in the recognized text
Documents & CardsDocuments, whiteboards, cards and tickets
Memes & CaptionedNo camera data, caption-sized text top or bottom
MisfiresBlack, blown-out and smeared frames
BlurryThe softest shots that also score poorly on aesthetics

Fast because it's built for Apple silicon

One worker per performance core, a cache that never re-reads an unchanged file, and the Neural Engine for the hard comparisons.

StageHow
PreviewsImageIO reads the preview embedded in RAW files and uses the hardware JPEG and HEVC decoders.
Content hashSHA-256 over sampled chunks, on the CPU's crypto extensions.
Perceptual hashesDCT pHash through Accelerate, plus mirrored pHash, dHash and a pixel correlation.
SimilarityApple Vision feature prints on the Neural Engine.
CacheSQLite, so unchanged files are never read twice.
Never deletesRemovals go to a quarantine folder or the Trash, and every move is journaled for Undo.
Fix ExtensionsRenames a JPEG named .CR2 to its real type. Undoable.
ReportsEvery analysis writes a JSON and CSV report next to the photos.