Gemini

Constant application hangups - and non-existent customer service=bad product. I paid for this application and find that customer service doesn't have time to help with the issues. Instead I receive 'We're swamped' messages that are nonsense. Moving to PhotoSweeper instead.

This 1-star review and rating refer ONLY TO THE PRICING POLICY, which is (perhaps deliberately?) confusing. As with so many apps these days, there are multiple pricing options depending on where you acquire the product (e.g., Mac App Store, or download) and whether you make any of those deceptive, poorly documented "in-app" purchases. If you get Gemini II from the Mac App Store, IT'S YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION ONLY. You discover (in the fine print, from the app itself, and only after you open it) that the terms are "3-day free trial, then $19.99/year." There, I just made it explicit, something neither the vendor nor the Mac App Store bother to do. Had MacPaw (the vendor) simply done that in the first place, I'd have given it 5 stars for pricing clarity. But no. Like all pricing on the App Store, what you will eventually pay to get full functionally isn't immediately obvious. You have to scroll down to the inevitable "In-App Purchases" to find the cost, and even then it's ambiguous. It's becoming more and more obvious that much "free" Mac App Store software is barely functional, something you don't find out until AFTER you download it. And then you're almost obligated to make the "in-app" purchase, at which point you finally find out how much it really costs. I have no idea what the $19.95 price listed here on MacUpdate means. Is it a license for a downloaded version? And if so, how long is it good for? Who knows? For more and more software listed on this site, the price listed is ALMOST MEANINGLESS. Not until you download and run it to find out the real price. Shame on MacUpdate. I can't comment on the efficacy of this software. $19.99 PER YEAR is way to high for a duplicate finder, no matter how good it is, so there's no sense in even bothering to try it out. It it's 5-stars at finding duplicates, wonderful, I hope the next reviewer will point that out. -SB

Nice idea, but a very slow piece of software! Takes ages for it to open also! Expected better from MacPaw.

The learning effect is very poor. One has to go trough ALL the files every time to select and special selections, for example files with exif-data, are not to select. In practice: the AI-claim is not found by me!

A few duplicates is fine to comb through manually but when it finds TONS(9G's worth or more, which is great to find and isolate) BUT i have to go through EVERY SINGLE ONE TO BE SURE(some have 5-7 dups if different locations serving different things i.e songs in different playlists with actual dups in Library not belonging to any playlist(and thats just songs), which is where AND STILL DELETE FILES I'D RATHER KEEP, kinds of defeats the purpose. I might as well have used Finder and dont the same tedious work...FOR FREE. Not impressed. More drill down filtering options is needed...the SMART delete part is NOT so smart if i have to go through each and every single line item!!!

I've been using Gemini for a two years. My current version is 1.5.15, because I didn't bother upgrading a year ago; the version 2 of the program didn't seem so different. I just ran the program on a certain folder which only give 1 duplicate. Because of that, I closely inspected the result and I noticed that the two TIFF files were absolutely different! The filesize is exact to the amount of bytes (probably because it are two similar microscope photos of a small object and a lot of black in the photo), but checking the MD5 hash gave a different result. Also visually it is clear that they are different, at least because one of the photos is annotated in the Microscope software. This false positive is enough for me to give the program a bad rating and delete it all together. Who knows how many data I have lost due to this sloppyness?

This is useful. I'm using the trial right now, but will be buying for sure. It works well, I also like the UI a lot!

MacPaw make great software, and this is a very useful dupe file cleaner. The UI of all of their apps are just gorgeous. Their design team is outstanding, and Gemini, and their other apps have been smooth operationally too.

I haven't tried this on music or regular files yet (I do have tons of dupes there, too), but I've been using it to clean out duplicate photos which are in random folders within an overall folder in which I have all my photos. Due to my "backup neurosis", I have multiple files in multiple locations, some of which have altered names, some of which had corrupted creation dates (repaired with A Better Finder Attributes, once I saw them in my Gemini 2 review panel). The photo folder is a mess! Because running Gemini on the entire folder leaves me with a mile long list, I've been comparing some of my biggest sets of likely duplicates by individual folder. This makes the selection and review process more manageable. I LOVE that I can choose whether to find "similar" files, or exact duplicates (pixel by pixel comparisons), that it usually makes the right selections as to what to delete, that I can choose entire folders and subfolders and tell the app (with the latest update) to deselect or select the duplicates in those specific folders as a batch, that I can choose to save the deleted files to a folder, instead of the Trash for my ultimate review, and that I can automatically create Hard Links to files I'd like to find under multiple directories, without actually having to have the duplicates in there. Also, I had to call Customer Service for a question. They're in the Ukraine - so it was 4am there. They answered the phone quickly, their English was impeccable, and the gentleman with whom I spoke was friendly, pleasant, respectful of my intelligence and helpful. So far, I'm loving this upgrade! The ONLY two feature requests I'm making thus far are: 1) I'd like to see the ability to create symlinks instead of only hard links (as I use multiple volumes and move my files among computers), and 2) that I can still have it recognize files that somehow have different sizes (off by kilobytes for some reason), without having to have it find all "similar" files. Once those are in, my 4.5 becomes a 5!