Apple's been dominating the tech world over the past few years with its popular smartphones, tablets, and computers. While Macs are known for their reliability and simplicity, they get bogged down over time through regular use with various junk files, caches, and temporary files.
Gemini 2 is a useful Mac application from MacPaw that helps you find and remove duplicate files on your machine. The app can scan for duplicates anywhere on your hard drive, including Photos, iTunes Music Library, Documents folder and even the Trash. Gemini 2 is easy to use: just drag any of the aforementioned items into its window to start scanning the files on your Mac.
MacPaw did not sponsor or have any say in this Gemini 2 review. All experiences and perspectives mentioned within this review are based on our usage of Gemini 2 over a period exceeding 2 years.
Is the Gemini 2 Duplicate Finder Safe to Use?
MacPaw's Gemini 2 is entirely safe to use and comes from a legitimate developer of MacOS applications. Despite some biased opinions on the internet, apps like CleanMyMac X and Gemini 2 are entirely helpful for maintaining the performance of your system over time and pose no risk or scam potential.
Gemini 2 is sold through MacPaw's website as well as through the Mac App Store. This means that the tool is notarized by Apple themselves as part of the process of approving applications into the Mac App Store and this means it has been cleared from malicious intent or harmful code.
Pricing & License Options
Similar to other MacPaw software, you can download and test our Gemini 2 using their free trial version. The trial offers no time stipulations. However, it is limited to just 500MB worth of cleaning. If you wish to perform a cleaning higher than the 500MB capacity (Gemini 2 will likely be going to find more than this for a hardcore user), you'll need to purchase a license:
Gemini 2 Licensing Options
- Trial (1 Mac, 500MB Cleaning Maximum) – Free
- Single License (1 Mac, 1-Year) – $19.95
- Single License (1 Mac, Lifetime) – $44.95
- Dual License (2 Macs, 1-Year) – $29.99
- Dual License (2 Macs, Lifetime) – $66.95
- Family License (5 Macs, 1-Year) – $44.95
- Family License (5 Macs, Lifetime) – $99.95
Setapp Subscription Option
If you decide you don't want to buy an annual or lifetime user license for just Gemini 2, then you do have one other option via MacPaw's Setapp monthly subscription.
If you aren't familiar with Setapp, it is a subscription service offering access to MacPaw's premium software such as CleanMyMac X and Gemini 2, along with dozens of other premium Mac applications spanning all sorts of categories. If you want more information, check out our full Setapp review.
There is a 7-day free trial period for Setapp offering full access to CleanMyMac X and Gemini 2 (our desired combo for Mac cleaning). There are no long-term contracts requires so you can cancel anytime (even before the trial ends or after a month), thus saving you money compared to an annual or lifetime Gemini 2 license.
User Interface & Layout
Having reviewed A LOT of different software for both Mac and PC, MacPaw's always been a company that prides itself on offering a sleek, user-friendly interface for its applications. Gemini 2 is no different, although due to the limited functionality of the program, the interface is much more straightforward than their sister applications.
The base loading screen only offers one option, which is to choose the folders that you wish to scan for duplicates. You can scan a custom folder or choose from three predefined folders: home, pictures, and music. The scanning process is fully guided and only requires a few clicks so you can't go wrong even if you aren't the best with technology.
Gemini 2's interface design was awarded the reddot award in 2017, which speaks to the level of detail and focus that MacPaw has put on its software such as this one.
Notable Features
This section is going to be a lot shorter than most of our reviews of Mac optimization software simply because Gemini 2 is very dedicated to one sole mission which is finding duplicate folders or similar files:
Smart Select & Cleanup
The default feature for safely discovering duplicate and similar files on your Mac from Gemini 2 is their Smart Scan. When inputting a folder to clean, the Gemini will automatically scan the contents for similar contents. The app will then display the scan results containing all of the discovered data with multiple copies and flag those it deems safe for automatic removal.
Due to the sensitivity of some potential data deletion, these “smart scan” results will often be a smaller number of duplicates and similar files than what it scans in its entirety. However, you will then have the option to go deeper and review the results of the scan to then manually flag files and delete duplicates.
Duplicate Files
In this case, duplicate files are going to be two files or folders on your Apple computer, which harness EXACTLY the same data within them.
These could be two identical installers, images, word documents, photos, videos, audio files, music files, or any form of digital data. In most cases, these are safe to remove.
However, you do have the option to review and exclude any flagged files or folders for the exclusion of the removal process.
An example of a duplicate file that you may want to keep would be a backup file for a work or school project. Any critical data that is important enough to ensure you have a valid backup somewhere in a safe location on your Mac.
Similar Files
A completely different approach to other Mac maintenance software that only offers identical duplicate finder, Gemini 2 can also flag files and folders that provide data that is very close, but not the same. This allows you to discover files (mostly media files like photos and video) that are taking up valuable disk space on your computer but not necessary to keep.
Gemini 2: Duplicate & Similar File Results
How does a duplicate file finder for Mac like Gemini 2 actually perform in a real-life situation? I recently ran it on my 16″ MacBook Pro and these were the results:
Performance Test On My 16″ MacBook Pro (6/7/21)
Looking at the results, Gemini 2 found 4.91 GB of exact duplicates on my MacBook, which I use primarily for work. These duplicate files are broken down into different segments, such as archives, images (photos library), video, and others.
The majority of my exact duplicates falling under the image category, which makes sense, given that I edit a lot of photos on this machine which may store multiple copies.
As for similar results, it found a whopping 29.5 GB of similar files, which not surprisingly all fell under the images category as well. Looking through the flagged files, the vast majority of them were in cases where I was shooting products or architecture photography of similar subjects within seconds of each other at different apertures, angles, or shutter speeds.
I can choose to use Gemini 2's smart cleanup, which removes only flagged files or folders that it doesn't deem necessary to the user, which in this case would be 2.13 GB.
The breakdown of the smart cleanup is as follows:
- Cloned archives – 1.64 GB
- Duplicated movies – 273.3 MB
- Duplicated folders – 18.3 MB
If I want to dive deeper and recover even more space, I can manually review and delete duplicate or similar files to regain 34.42 GB in total potential storage space savings.
Review Summary
In this review, we dove deep into the interface, features, and functionality of MacPaw's Gemini 2. From our experience, the software is the best duplicate finder for Mac users and should be a must-use application for those looking to salvage valuable storage space by scanning for duplicate and similar files on your Mac.
For those who really need the extra cleaning power, we recommend coupling Gemini 2 with MacPaw's sister software, CleanMyMac X. The two combined offer some of the best performance, features, and user interfaces that we've tested to date. To save on this software combination and get access to even more premium apps, check out their Setapp subscription.