The Overmacs Team has released PhotoSweeper 2.0 with various improvements:

• New pixel-perfect user interface looking gorgeous on Yosemite
• Even a faster performance, tremendously impressive for huge collections (100K+ images)
• Incredibly simple & user-friendly comparison settings to define the desired result: finding duplicates, similar photos, series of shots
• New View Results modes that allow you to compare and mark photos better with just a click
• Improved auto-marking feature for a swift & easy photo handling
• Auto-lock folders and rules
• Integration with Finder and Dock

The update is a FREE one for all current customers. You have the chance to win a free license, read more about the giveaway at the end of the blog entry! So far so good, but what is PhotoSweeper?

With PhotoSweeper you get a great tool that let you sweep your dupes away. Ever returned from a shooting with hundreds of photos? Sounds familiar to you? What is your workflow to find the good ones? How time consuming is it? It’s probably one of your favorite tasks right? Well, no matter how you are organized, storing your images on a hard drive in various folders or using Aperture or Lightroom. PhotoSweeper can work on all your sources. You simply show PhotoSweeper where you want to look at and search for dupes. As they from Overmacs say PhotoSweeper will work even on huge collections I decided to try out my Nova Scotia collection from 2010 where we have taken over 7700 photos and in less than five minutes PhotoSweeper read all images and was ready to compare the shots. The source was my Lightroom catalog and the images are stored on my NAS. But just reading the files is not enough what really time consuming is, is comparing the images depending on your settings. PhotoSweeper is offering various settings to define what should be called as a duplicate.

With the settings I made PhotoSweeper took about 45 Minutes to present the results, during this time I was able to do other tasks and work on my Mac, so the performance is fairly good.

So up to now I did not spend much time in comparing my images.

After duplicates have been found you can let PhotoSweeper let the images “Auto Mark” depending on various options you define in the PhotoSweeper settings:

I would recommend to make your choice here and let PhotoSweeper let do the “Auto Mark” as up to here nothing is going to happen to your images, except they are marked. You can easily unmark all images with a few clicks — select all images and click unmark, or start from here to check the marks that PhotoSweeper has made. The benefit with “Auto Mark” is that it takes just seconds even with over 500 duplicates to let PhotoSweeper decide which of your dupes are the best choice. After that you can always refine the details of matching with a simple slider called: Matching Level – if you drag the slider the groups of images that were identified as dupe will be adjusted to the match level on the fly. Each change to the slider gives the option to let PhotoSweeper auto mark your images again.

Your duplicates can be compared at three views: 1.) One by One (showing only one photo at a time, where you choose the image to view from the thumbs) 2) Face to Face and 3) All in One.

With a simple click you can mark or unmark the photos you like to sweep away. Once done with your choices you have several options what should happen to your marked photos, which is also depending from which source your photos came from. Just to name a few options what you can do: for Aperture photos can be moved to the Aperture Trash, for iPhoto the iPhoto Trash, for Lightroom you will find a dedicated Trash (PhotoSweeper) collection. Other options are File > Move to Folder and Rename or File > Copy to Folder and Rename.

Some other neat features are that PhotoSweeper will also work with videos, but it will find only absolute identical video files, regardless of your comparison settings you choose. And a very good thing for the ones who like to have extra security on special items, you can define locks on photos. Locked photos are used for comparison but they can’t be marked for deleting and at the preference settings you can even add entire folders that should “auto locked”. Whenever choosing an image from such a folder your image gets a lock automatically or you define a special rule that should be applied to find only a subset of images for auto locking.

At the end PhotoSweeper is a valuable and great tool, that saves you precious time in finding duplicates and deciding which of your duplicates should be kept and what should happen to the other ones. You find the new PhotoSweeper 2 at the Mac App Store . As said before it is a free update to all existing PhotoSweeper users!

Your chance to win:

My friends from Overmacs have spend redeem codes to my readers, which I will giveaway here at my blog. You have the chance to win one license and grab your free copy at the Apple’s App store. Please note that this is a shared giveaway – so all readers will put into one raffle – so there is no difference if you participate from the English or German blog site – you can enter only once but you can collect multiple entries by completing all tasks. (Please allow Cookies)
If you have trouble with the following giveaway tool, simply leave a comment below and you are taking part of the raffle – yes nothing more to day but your chances raise if you use the raffle tool as well!

Good Luck!

[Update: 01.03.2015]

And the winners are ….

Holger R.

Thomas S.

Joachim S.

Congrats – Your license codes are send to you by email!

If you like to see more have a look at these videos by Overmacs:

Speed Test
Workflow Tips
Importing best photo from SD Card