Reclaim your hard drive with Gemini
October 14, 2019
Reclaim your hard drive with Gemini
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Gemini
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Gemini keeps me productive by not having to spend time wading through my files to find what I've copied in multiple locations. It does the heavy lifting for me and lets me choose what to keep and what to trash.
- Gemini has enabled us to purchase less expensive laptops by not needing to pay for as much storage. Once purchased, those laptops can be sustained for longer by using Gemini to keep storage space managed.
- Gemini has also enabled us to keep our cloud storage footprint manageable, by identifying duplicates across local and cloud storage.
It's really not fair to compare Gemini to iCloud, but of the products offered, I could not find one that was a direct comparison to Gemini. What I will say is that Gemini works well in conjunction with iCloud as, without Gemini, iCloud replication across Macs would exacerbate the duplicate file problem. Instead, Gemini works to clean up duplicates in iCloud as well, eliminating duplication of files across the cloud.
Do you think Gemini delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Gemini's feature set?
Yes
Did Gemini live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Gemini go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Gemini again?
Yes