The Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is an easy-to-use program that will quickly locate and display duplicate or similar images that might be cluttering your hard drive.

Just point the program at the folders you'd like it to check, and it will scan them for image files, then compare these to look for possible duplicates (or just similar pictures, like two consecutive frame grabs from a TV show or movie). We thought this might be a lengthy process, but Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder proved a real surprise, checking more than 1,500 photos every minute on our test PC.

Once the search is over then you'll see the report, which is essentially just a list of matching files. Scroll down until you find something interesting, click the entry for a particular pair of files and you'll see a preview window for both, with their "Similarity" percentage.

If you decide a particular image is an unnecessary duplicate then you can click the Delete button and it'll be removed immediately.

But if you're not sure, then clicking the Browse button will open an Explorer window at the file's location, giving you valuable context that might explain why this duplicate exists, perhaps preventing you from deleting something important.

Please note, Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder will by default install rather less awesome toolbars, along with its own code. Pay attention during setup if you don't want this.