Delete similar photos and old screenshots on your Mac

Why similar photos pile up

Phones make it effortless to take five shots of the same moment to get one good one, and the other four stay. Screenshots are taken to remember something for a minute and kept for years. Over time they make up a real share of a photo library, and they make the photos you care about harder to find.

They are also hard to clear by hand. Near-identical photos aren't duplicates: each is a slightly different file, so a duplicate finder that compares bytes won't group them. You have to compare what the pictures look like, and then decide which is the best one.

Similar photos, grouped by what they show

Tidy My Mac looks at photos taken within a minute of each other, and uses Apple's Vision framework on your Mac to measure how alike each pair looks. Shots that are close enough, such as a burst, or the same picture slightly cropped or brightened, are put in one group. Photos taken further apart are never compared, which keeps the scan quick even on a large library.

In each group, one photo is marked Keep with the reason it was chosen. It picks, in this order:

1. a photo you marked as a Favorite;
2. then one you Edited;
3. then the clearly Sharpest;
4. then the Highest resolution;
5. then the Largest file;
6. and otherwise the one Taken first.

Select All but Kept ticks the rest of every group, or you can pick photos one by one. Whatever you tick, one photo of every group always stays.

Old screenshots

The Old Screenshots tab lists the screenshots that are more than 30 days old, oldest first. macOS marks screenshots as such, in the Photos library and on the file itself, so they are found even if you renamed them.

Blurry photos, if you ask

Turn on Find blurry photos and Tidy My Mac measures the sharpness of every photo, not only those in groups, and lists the blurriest in a Blurry tab. It is off by default, for two reasons: it has to read every photo, so the scan takes longer, and what looks blurry depends on the subject. A foggy landscape is soft on purpose. Check each one before you remove it. Screenshots are never counted as blurry.

Your Photos library and your folders

Two switches choose where to look: Photos library, and Pictures, Desktop and Downloads. For the library, macOS asks once whether Tidy My Mac may access your photos; if you share only some of them, only those are compared. In the folders, it looks at JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF and WebP images taken by a camera, and at screenshots. Icons, exports and other images without a camera date are left out, so a folder of graphics doesn't look like a burst of photos.

Where removed photos go

Choose Remove and the confirmation says where each photo will go:

Either way, the removal is recorded in the cleanup history on the Dashboard. Removing a library photo also removes it from every device that syncs with that library through iCloud Photos, as deleting in Photos itself does.

Photos and the rest of Clean up

Photos compares what pictures look like. For exact copies of any kind of file, including photos copied between folders, use Duplicates. For large videos, see Large Files.

Full Disk Access

Desktop and Downloads are protected by macOS. Until you grant Full Disk Access, Photos looks only in Pictures and leaves those two folders out, rather than raising a prompt for each. The Photos library uses its own permission, which you can change in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos.