DupeRemover

Privacy Policy

App: Dupe Remover Developer: Mathieu Rancourt Last updated: 2026-08-04

Summary

Dupe Remover does not collect, transmit, store, share, or sell any personal information. Everything the app does happens entirely on your device — Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Information we collect

None. The app has no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising SDKs, no user accounts, and no third-party services of any kind.

Network access

Dupe Remover makes no internet connections of its own. It contains no networking code and no third-party SDKs, on either platform.

On macOS this is enforced by the system: the app ships with no network entitlements, so macOS prevents it from making any internet connection — incoming or outgoing — regardless of how it is used. You can verify this in the app’s signed entitlements:

• com.apple.security.network.client — not present
• com.apple.security.network.server — not present

On iOS the app makes no network requests of its own; your photos are never sent anywhere.

One clarification, because it is the only place anything leaves the device’s control: if a photo in your iCloud library is not stored locally, asking the system Photos framework for its thumbnail or preview can make the system download that photo from your own iCloud account, exactly as the Photos app would. That is Apple’s software fetching your own photo for display, not Dupe Remover uploading anything. The parts that do the actual work — hashing and visual fingerprinting — are restricted to locally stored photos and never trigger a download.

Photos the app reads

Dupe Remover can scan two kinds of sources, and both platforms work the same way:

• Your Photos library. The app asks for Photos access the first time you scan your library. If you grant access to selected photos only, the scan covers just those. You can also scope a scan to a single album.
• A folder you choose. On macOS you pick folders in the “Choose folder…” dialog; on iOS you pick a folder with the system document picker. The app can only read folders you have personally selected, and it does not remember that permission between launches — you are asked again each time you launch the app.

Within a scanned library or folder, the app reads image files (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, GIF, WebP, BMP) in order to compare them and group duplicates.

Files the app writes

The only data Dupe Remover writes outside the photos you scan is a local cache stored inside the app’s own private container.

On macOS:

~/Library/Containers/com.matranc.duperemover/Data/Library/Application Support/com.matranc.duperemover/cache.log

On iOS, the equivalent path inside the app’s container, which no other app can read:

Library/Application Support/com.matranc.duperemover/cache.log

The cache contains:

• An identifier for each item already scanned — a file path, or a Photos local identifier
• Modification dates and a size or pixel-count value, used to notice when a photo has changed
• SHA-256 hashes of those images
• Visual feature prints generated by Apple’s on-device Vision framework

The cache exists so repeat scans of the same library finish in seconds instead of recomputing everything. It never leaves your device.

You can delete the cache at any time from the app’s menu: open the three-dot menu → “Clear cache.”

Deletion of your photos

Dupe Remover never permanently deletes anything:

• Files scanned from a folder are moved to the system Trash, and can be restored until you empty it. If a location does not support a Trash, the app tells you it could not delete those files rather than removing them outright.
• Photos scanned from your library are moved to Recently Deleted, where they stay for about 30 days before the system removes them.

Children’s privacy

Because the app collects no information of any kind from any user, it is automatically compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and similar legislation.

Changes to this policy

If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be published at the same URL with a new “Last updated” date. Because the app does not collect data, material changes are not anticipated.

Contact

Open an issue at https://github.com/MatRanc/DupeRemover/issues.

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