Reclaim your hard drive with Gemini
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As Apple continues to put a premium on storage space on its MacBooks, individuals and companies alike are pressured to purchase smaller storage options than they otherwise would have. As a result, several great Mac utilities, such as Gemini and DaisyDisk have cropped up to help users manage the smaller storage on their machines. Gemini helps users solve this problem by identifying duplicate files for users so that they can better organize their file system, while simultaneously eliminating storage-wasting duplicates.
Pros
- File De-Duplication - Gemini does a great job of finding files that are bit-for-bit identical to each other. Typically these are caused by user replication, and Gemini sniffs them out and displays them for easy user decisions.
- Similar Photo identification - Got a lot of similar photos, but not the exact same one? That's ok, this is a huge source of wasted space, and Gemini can deal with these too. If you're a "spray and pray" type of photographer, Gemini will help you clean up near-duplicate photos, helping you keep only the best.
- Fast File Triage - Once Gemini has identified all these duplicates, what do you do with them? Gemini helps you triage the list of duplicates and easily decide which copies to keep. This is handy if you want to keep all files in the X folder, but not in the Y folder.
Cons
- With the recent update to macOS Catalina, Gemini hasn't been updated yet. As a result, it requests access to each folder you want to scan for duplicates. Not ideal. It could take an approach like other apps, and ask for full-disk access through privacy settings instead.
- Gemini could make a more robust rule system that enables you to select which file to delete based on regular expressions, for instance.
- While Gemini helps me identify similar, though not identical photos, it's still up to me to decide which ones are the "best". Perhaps if Gemini did some machine learning on these photos, it could learn which are the best, and help you choose.
Likelihood to Recommend
As I described in the initial use case, Mac storage is a premium, so having a tool that helps your storage stay clean is incredibly useful. Almost always, duplicates are wasted space, so Gemini is a single purpose tool that helps you identify duplicates easily for quick clean up of your Mac's hard drive. Point of fact, it'll help clean up your cloud storage space too, if you select your cloud sync folders on your machine as well!
