Heiward, which finds your duplicate photos and videos

What Heiward does#

The heiward, the hedge warden, kept the village's hedges trimmed and its fences sound. Heiward finds the duplicate photos and videos on your PC, including resized, recompressed, cropped, mirrored and edited copies, and lists them on its review page. Nothing is removed until you say so, and what you tick goes to the Recycle Bin.

Heiward is free, and needs no license. It works on its own, or, with Castellan installed, as one of the household. Download Heiward.

All of it runs on your PC: it has no account, and nothing about you or your files leaves it.

Where it looks#

Every fixed drive, internal or external, leaving out what isn't yours to tidy:

• Windows, programs and app data.
• Game libraries: the games need their files.
• Photo apps' own libraries, such as Lightroom's.
• Code repositories.
• Other people's accounts.

USB sticks, card readers and network drives are left out unless you add them. Right-click a folder on the page to include it or leave it out, or a drive to scan only when you ask, so an archive disk can sleep.

Files only in the cloud (OneDrive and the like) are never read: reading one would download it.

How it tells a copy#

Only plain copies are ticked. Everything else waits for you to look.

Not offered at all:

• Burst shots and retakes: photos numbered one after another (IMG_1234, IMG_1235), or taken seconds apart. They're different moments, however alike.
• A game's video in another language, or with another soundtrack.
• Pictures less than 75% alike.

Which copy it keeps#

• Photos: the highest resolution, then the camera's original, then the oldest file.
• Videos: the longest, then the highest resolution and quality.
• Identical copies: the one in a cloud-synced folder, then the one outside Downloads, the Desktop or temp, then the one without "copy" or "(1)" in its name.

Before anything goes#

Heiward refuses:

• a cleanup that would leave no copy;
• a file changed since the scan;
• a file Windows would delete for good: on a network or removable drive, too big for the Recycle Bin, or on a drive whose bin is off.

Cloud-synced files (iCloud Photos, OneDrive, Dropbox) are marked, and you're asked before they go: deleting one deletes it from the cloud and your other devices too.

The AI, on this PC#

Heiward compares pictures and video frames with a vision model, DINOv2. It runs on the PC's AI chip (an NPU) when there is one: fast, and light on power, so it can scan every hour. Without one, it runs on the graphics card or the processor, every 6 hours on mains power, or only when you ask, as you chose when installing.

A badge in the title bar says where it runs, and why not on the NPU. It takes turns with the other agents for the NPU, and scans make way while a game or anything full screen runs.

When it scans#

Every hour with an NPU. A scan reads only new and changed files. In the background it runs in Windows' efficiency mode, using at most a quarter of the processor; Scan now, and any scan while the review page is open, runs at full speed.

Its review page#

Heiward's page is at http://heiward.localhost:18484/, laid out like File Explorer: a card per drive, a folder tree, and the duplicates of the folder you're in. See Review and clean up duplicates.

Game mode, and developer mode#

• Game mode lists what games leave behind: leftovers of uninstalled games, download and shader caches, crash dumps. See Heiward's game mode.
• Developer mode lists what development tools leave behind. See Heiward for developers.

Both are off until you turn them on in its Settings.

Themes#

The palette button in the title bar picks Match Windows, Light, Dark, or one of six colour themes. With Castellan installed, Castellan's theme is Heiward's too.