DuoBolt 2.0 — Rewritten from scratch, and it finds photos now
DuoBolt 2.0 is a complete rewrite. Same app, rebuilt from the ground up in Rust on a native UI toolkit, with a second engine beside the duplicate finder: similar photos, grouped and ranked by on-device AI. Your license carries over — 1.x customers get 2.0 free, and DuoBolt adopts the license already on the machine the first time it runs.
What’s New
- Similar photos: a second engine that finds photos which merely look alike — bursts, edits, re-saves, screenshots of the same thing — and groups them. Duplicates still means byte-for-byte identical; this is everything that isn’t.
- AI Curation ranks a group of near-identical shots and says why it picked what it picked: eyes open, smiling, face sharpness, framing. It runs entirely on your Mac or PC — no upload, no account, no network.
- RAW files are read directly, from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji and more, rather than skipped or read through an embedded preview.
- Duplicate results are now two columns: groups on the left, the files inside the selected group on the right, each scrolling and navigable on its own. 1.x expanded a group in place and pushed everything below it down the page, so comparing two groups meant scrolling back and forth.
- Results can be filtered by name or path, file type, extension, tag, and a size range bounded to what the scan actually found, then sorted by recoverable space, number of copies, file size, type or tag. Every filter applies after the scan, so narrowing down never means running it again.
- Each filter now reports what its own values are worth over the set the other filters leave. Choose Images and the extension list immediately shows the sizes and counts within images, not within everything — so you can see what a filter will do before you apply it.
- New Dashboard with lifetime scan and deletion stats, your recent scans, and space reclaimed broken down by file type.
- Fullscreen preview plays photos, video and audio in place, so a file can be judged before it moves rather than after.
- DuoBolt no longer stops working when a trial ends. Every download starts with 7 days of Pro; after that it keeps scanning and showing everything it finds, and caps only what a single operation moves.
Improvements
- Rewritten in Rust on a native UI toolkit built for this app. It uses roughly half the memory of 1.x and stays responsive on result sets that used to make it crawl.
- Scans run off the interface thread, so the window keeps drawing while a scan does not.
- Thumbnails are cached on disk between runs, so reopening a set of results is immediate rather than a second round of decoding.
- The review surface is navigable from the keyboard, with the selection, filters and preview reachable without the mouse.
Notes
- Byte-for-byte matching with BLAKE3, APFS clone awareness on macOS, Trash, Delete, Archive and Copy to…, Protected Folders, tags, saved scan setups and session restore all carry over from 1.x unchanged.
- Your 1.x license is picked up automatically on first launch and keeps its seat. 1.x and 2.0 can be installed side by side.
- Pro adds similar photos on every group and AI Curation everywhere. Standard and the free tier see the first 8 groups, whole — the grid, the ranking and the deletion all work inside them.
- Licenses now cover their major version. All 2.x updates are included, forever; a future 3.0 will be an optional paid upgrade, discounted for existing customers.
- Requires macOS 11 or later, or Windows 10 and 11.