Shoot Alike

Shoot Alike offers a convenient solution for finding duplicate files on your computer. It often happens that we download the same media or document file from the Internet, or save photos from our camera to different folders more than once.

The moment you notice that you don't have enough storing space on your hard drive, it is recommended that you use a program like Shoot Alike to clean up your disk of identical files.

The program comes with a modern and very attractive interface. It is mainly designed to scan for duplicate files belonging to certain file types. To be more specific, you can look for videos, audios, images, documents, archives, or miscellaneous files that you saved several times in different computer locations. The choice to scan for all the above-mentioned file categories or just for given file types is entirely yours. What's great about this program is that you can set scanning filters. The file size is the main criterion. The program allows you to configure a size range from 0 KB up to 1023 GB – if you know roughly the size of your files, you may set the minimum and maximum size limitations. The files that don't fall within the interval will not appear on the results list. Furthermore, you can enable additional scanning exceptions – namely, specific sub-folders and file extensions may be excluded from search. You can even configure the utility not to scan for files featuring specific names.

Once the settings are done, all you need to do is load the folder you want to scan. When the searching process is over, the program will display the duplicates conveniently organizing them into file type categories. A pie chart will give you an overview upon the duplicate files that were found. In addition, you can see at a glance the amount of duplicate files and their total size in each file type category. The tool's greatest asset resides in its preview capabilities. Few similar programs provide the option to show the content of the scanned files. It seems that Shoot Alike is one of them. Having such a feature at your disposal, it is easier for you to determine which files should be removed and which of them are worth keeping.

Personally, I don't have any complaint about this tool. The program works well and the scanning process is fast. The ability to apply search filters makes it even faster. It does find all duplicate files, since it takes into account multiple identification criteria. For testing purposes, I saved a file in several sub-folders under different names, and all duplicates were identified (because of their identical size and format type) and reported, one after another, into the same file category.