Tidy
Up is a powerful full-featured duplication finding app for Macs. One of the
problems many Mac users encounter is what to do when their Mac’s drive begins to fill up.
As
you know, a full drive leads to very poor Mac performance. But which files
should you get rid of? That’s
where Tidy Up comes in, by finding all the duplicate files your Mac may
contain.
When
it comes to using Tidy Up, it does not matter if you're a novice or an expert,
you need to apply caution so you don't go deleting all the duplicate files the
app finds.
Pros
·
Simple and advanced search modes.
·
Strategy Wizard can guide you in finding
duplicates.
·
Smart Boxes to the house found duplicate files.
·
Find duplicates by a myriad of criteria.
·
Finds duplicate folders as well as files.
·
Fast; doesn’t
need to index a drive before searching.
·
Provides previews of common file types, such as
audio, images, and PDFs.
Cons
·
Doesn't differentiate between originals and
copies.
·
Requires you to individually select each
duplicate to be removed.
Installing Tidy Up
Installation
is very easy; just drag Tidy Up to your /Applications folder, and you're ready
to use the app. Likewise, Tidy Up doesn't seem to create any files outside of
its own app bundle, making uninstalling it a simple drag-it-to-the-trash deal.
Using Tidy Up
Tidy
Up makes use of smart searches; essentially, a set of criteria used by Tidy Up
to search. Smart searches contain the details of the duplicate files you're
looking for; as an example, iTunes music files that use AAC encoding and have
the same song name and artist, are from the same album and have the same content.
Besides
finding duplicates that match exactly, you can also find similar files that may
not be an exact match for all criteria but are otherwise a close match. For
example, iTunes songs that match all of the criteria specified, but have
different creation dates.
Smart
searches are the basis for Tidy Up, but creating and executing smart searches
can be time-consuming. To help users along, Tidy Upstarts up in a Simple Mode.
Simple Mode
Simple The mode is the default for how Tidy Up is used. In Simple Mode, Tidy Up provides a large set of pre-made smart searches that can find images, Photos images,
Aperture images, iPhoto images, images by EXIF data, music, iTunes music, music
by tags, folders, other files and packages, and miscellaneous.
Each
premade smart search can be modified to fit your needs, but the premade
searches should work pretty well for most users.
Advanced Mode
Advanced
Mode puts more power into the user's hands and allows the creation of custom
smart searches. An example of the additional capabilities can be seen in the
Images by EXIF smart search, which allows you to search for a few specific EXIF
data types, such as date taken, location, camera, and image type.
While in
Advanced Mode, you'll find you can dig down through EXIF information to find
exact matches.
You
can use the Advanced Mode to build up complex smart searches to help find exact
duplicates or even very similar items; it all depends on how you set the search
up.
Strategy Wizard
The
Strategy Wizard is part of the Advanced Mode; through a series of questions, it
will help you build a new smart search to use to find duplicates.
Sources
Tidy
Up can search any locally attached storage devices, and most network devices,
as long as they show up as a mounted disk on your Mac. Not only can a mounted
drive be searched, but you can limit searches to specific folders on a mounted
device. The more you limit the search location, the faster the Tidy Up can find
duplicates.
Search Results
Results
from a search are displayed in a separate window and placed into boxes, which
are virtual containers that hold similar items. You can select a box to open it
and view its contents.
The
box system helps keep a large list of search results from being overwhelming.
It lets you focus on checking results by duplicates that are associated with
each other.
One
thing Tidy Up doesn't do is provide an indication of which item in a group of
duplicates is the original. Besides the fact that determining which is original
would be a bit time consuming and fraught with mishaps, Tidy Up would rather
leave this task to you.
This has the advantage of forcing you to take your time
when combing though duplicates to figure out which one to keep and which to
toss.
Tidy
Up does help the process along by providing file viewers for most popular file
types. This allows you to preview the files directly in Tidy Up.
For files not
supported by Tidy Up, there's an option to reveal the duplicate files in the
Finder, allowing you to open them for examination with the app that created
them.
Review
Tidy
Up provides a nice mix of features, allowing you to use the Simple Mode for
most file searches while having the option to jump into the Advanced Mode when
needed.
The search results and the use of boxes to store duplicate results in
is unusual but workable.
Tidy
Up needs a simple results window, just like it has a Simple Mode. Sometimes, I
just want to see exact and similar results grouped together in a list, boxes or
no boxes.
Aside
from boxes, which are certainly usable, Tidy Up does a great job at finding
duplicates, as well as similar items, and really, that’s the reason for using this app.
Tidy
Up is $29.99. A demo is available.
0 Comments