Twinkeep

What Twinkeep is

Twinkeep is a duplicate file finder for macOS. It matches files by their contents rather than their names, so a copy is caught whatever it was renamed to. Exact duplicates are quarantined for you; only the genuine judgment calls reach you.

Out of the box Twinkeep scans photos, video and audio. Documents, Code and an All file types switch are in Settings, off until you turn them on — turn one on and the same content matching covers PDFs, spreadsheets, Pages documents, source files, or simply everything in a folder. Near-duplicate matching, for the same shot re-cropped or re-exported, applies to photos; every other kind is matched exactly, byte for byte.

The same shot saved four times — once from your camera, once from a text, twice from an export. Twinkeep finds duplicate photos, videos, and audio on your Mac, quarantines the byte-identical extras for you, and brings you only the judgment calls.

It is three tools in one native app: a duplicate file cleaner, File Rules that watch folders and file new arrivals automatically, and Maintain utilities for everyday housekeeping. Everything runs on your Mac. No account, no telemetry, no subscription — one purchase.

You only review what is actually in doubt

Byte-identical files are matched by content, and their extras go straight to Quarantine. A thousand of them take no more of your time than one. Review is kept for the genuine maybes — the same shot re-cropped, re-exported, or resaved — where only you can say which to keep.

When one does need your eye, Twinkeep puts both copies on screen at full size, side by side, with zoom and pan moving together down to 100% pixels and a strip between them calling out exactly what differs: dimensions, file size, format, camera, date. One key decides it.

Nothing disappears

Every removal goes to Quarantine first — never straight to delete. Restore anything, any time, back to exactly where it came from. Browse it as a list, icons, gallery, or filmstrip. Emptying it permanently is the one action Twinkeep will not do without asking.

What we fixed, and why

Version 1.1 is mostly the result of going back through the app and asking what it was quietly getting wrong. Some of it is uncomfortable to write down, so here it is plainly.

• Junk Sweep could delete your crash reports. It listed the folder macOS writes crash and hang reports into as “safe to clean”, and pre-selected it — which meant a routine cleanup quietly destroyed the same reports the Stability tool reads. That folder is now permanently off limits, with a test that fails if anyone ever puts it back.
• Three tools said “nothing found” when they meant “I cannot look”. On the App Store build, Downloads Dust, Disk Analysis and Stability showed empty results when macOS had not granted folder access — indistinguishable from a clean Mac. They now say access is needed and offer to ask for it.
• Memory Relief overstated what it freed. Quitting is a request an app can decline; one with unsaved changes stays open. Twinkeep counted those as freed memory. It now waits to see what actually closed and reports only that.
• File Rules started working before you asked it to. It now ships switched off. Nothing on your Mac moves until you turn it on.
• Folder sizes ignored hidden files, so the amount Junk Sweep promised was less than it actually reclaimed. Totals now include them.
• The background stability monitor rewrote its entire history every minute. Now it appends a line.

None of that is exciting. All of it is the difference between a utility you can trust with your files and one you cannot.

Duplicate cleaning

• Exact duplicates — SHA-256 content hashing finds byte-identical files whatever they are named; extras are quarantined for you automatically, and you can switch that off
• Similar photos — perceptual matching groups the same shot re-cropped, re-exported or resaved, and always waits for your decision
• Photos, video, and audio in one scanner
• Scan any folders you choose, including external drives
• Smart keep policy — prefers Live Photo and HEIC originals over copy-like names, then the older file and the shorter path
• Speed modes and a hash index so rescans stay fast

Compress — space back, without a one-way door

Drop photos, videos or a whole folder. Photos re-encode at the quality you choose; video re-encodes to 1080p, 720p or 480p, using HEVC where the file allows it.

The part other compressors leave vague is what happens to your originals. Twinkeep makes you choose, and says what each choice costs: move them to Quarantine and restore any of them later, move them to the Trash, keep them and free nothing at all, or delete them and get the space now with nothing to restore. Whichever you pick is written next to the button before you press it.

“Just the photo” is the privacy one. A Live Photo carries a few seconds of video — with sound — so sending one can send whatever was being said in the room. This writes the picture on its own at full quality and removes the motion clip, its audio, the depth map and the HDR extras. You can drop the location and camera details too. A video is only treated as the motion clip when it agrees with the photo on Apple’s Live Photo identifier, so an unrelated file that happens to share a name is never touched.

File Rules — the folder that keeps itself tidy

Cleanup apps tidy once. File Rules stops the mess coming back. Point it at Downloads, the Desktop, or any folder you choose, and new arrivals get filed the moment they land — sixteen ways to match, nine things to do, including rules that act on whether a file is already a duplicate of something you keep. Folder automation like this is normally an app you buy separately.

Maintain — everyday Mac housekeeping

• Junk Sweep — caches, logs, and Xcode build junk, sorted by risk
• Downloads Dust — old files still sitting in Downloads
• Disk Analysis — which folders are actually using your space
• Storage Pulse — capacity and free space, including what macOS holds as purgeable
• Memory Relief — which apps are using the most memory, and quit the ones you choose
• Stability — crash reports in plain English, with an optional local CPU and memory history

Requirements

• macOS 13 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel

Privacy & safety

Every scan runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and no telemetry. Keep a current backup of anything irreplaceable before any cleanup tool touches it — Twinkeep moves files you approve, and quarantines exact duplicates automatically unless you switch that off. See the in-app EULA and Disclaimer.

Native SwiftUI · CryptoKit hashing · App sandbox with user-selected folders