Can we talk about discovering I had 14GB of duplicate memes?

Ran a duplicate file scanner on my meme folder yesterday and found 14GB of the exact same images saved across different subfolders. That's like three whole seasons of a Netflix show in wasted space. Has anyone else found a shocking amount of junk after running one of those cleanup tools?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_karen8d ago

Wait, did you check if those duplicates were from the same source or just the same memes saved at different times? I found 8 gigs of reaction images that were all versions of the same crying cat but with different text overlays saved as separate files. The scanner flagged them but my dumbass saved them manually from different threads thinking they were new.

hannahs718d ago

When I ran a dedupe tool on my drives, the real game changer was setting it to ignore file names and just compare visual content. Apps like Duplicate Cleaner let you do image fingerprinting, so it catches files that look the same even if one is named "meme.jpg" and the other is "lol.png". I ended up deleting almost 10GB of stuff I thought were unique but were literally the exact same meme copy saved months apart. The other trick I found was grouping results by folder to spot where the bulk of your duplicates are hiding, because for me it was all in one "Unsorted" folder I never cleaned. Did yours group them in a specific folder too or was it scattered everywhere?