Elegant Photo Cleaner finds the same photo even when the copies have different names, sizes and dates — and it never deletes anything without you. Twenty thousand photos on the disk. The twelve frames of one burst. The screenshot you took of your own photo. The version WhatsApp recompressed to fit the group chat. The RAW and the JPG side by side. The export still sleeping next to the original. No byte-comparing program finds any of that, because those copies are not identical byte for byte — they are look-alikes. The usual way out is sending your photos to a stranger's cloud, letting an app decide on its own what to delete, and subscribing forever. Elegant Photo Cleaner is the third option: it runs on your PC, it shows the evidence behind every match, and only your click sends anything to the Recycle Bin. WHY IT'S DIFFERENT • No photo leaves your PC. No image, no file name and no hash is sent anywhere. The only connection the app makes is to Microsoft Store, through Windows itself, for licensing and the trial. • Math, not AI. dHash, pHash, Hamming distance, Laplacian variance and EXIF clustering. There is no model and no guesswork: the same library always gives the same result. • One price, once. US$ 12.99 once — US$ 9.99 at launch. No renewal, no "your plan expired", no feature that disappears when a monthly payment lapses. • Nothing is pre-selected. The app never marks a victim for you. Only the byte-for-byte copy, verified by SHA-256, gets a suggestion badge — and even that one waits for you. The similarity step changes what you SEE, never what is proposed. • It shows you WHY two photos are together. In words, not with a number: "the same photo, rotated", "the same photo, mirrored". There is no 0-to-100 score on this screen, and that is a design decision, not a missing feature. • Everything that leaves goes to the Windows Recycle Bin. Permanent deletion does not exist in this app — not as a hidden option, not as a checkbox. When the drive has no Recycle Bin (USB stick, memory card, network drive), it warns you first and leaves those files out. • A safety net on both sides. Before moving, it writes down what it intends to do and re-checks the bytes; after moving, it verifies that the surviving photo actually OPENS — and if it doesn't, the whole batch comes back from the Recycle Bin. Undo is still there on the next launch, and the Live Photo's .MOV goes and returns together with the .HEIC. WHAT IT FINDS Identical files, same bytes and same SHA-256. Look-alikes, by dHash AND pHash — never "or". Recompressed and resized: the same image at another weight. Bursts: same camera, shots two seconds apart. Screenshots that contain a photo from your own library. RAW + JPG pairs from the same shot, verified one by one. Similar videos by keyframes, when you switch that analysis on. Eight kinds of stack, and the label never lies: the kind comes from the evidence edges, not from a similarity estimate. In the engine's own tests, the same photo rotated, mirrored, recompressed or resized is found again in 99% to 100% of cases. Very "flat" photos — sky, plain wall, scanned document — are the hard case: 80% on the Conservative step, which is the default and is deliberately cautious, and 100% from Normal upwards. AFTER THE CLEANUP The scoreboard counts what happened, not what had been planned. Then it offers to file the survivors by their real capture date, rename them from EXIF and build a contact sheet. None of these offers acts on the first click: the first click builds and shows the plan, the second one runs it. Nothing is overwritten — a repeated name gets a suffix, applied by Windows itself. Native C#/.NET, using the image decoding already built into Windows. In English, Portuguese and Spanish, switchable on the fly. Light, dark or automatic; classic or modern. It honors the Windows text-scale and reduce-motion settings. Try it for 15 days, no card. Then it is a one-time purchase — no subscription, valid on your other PCs using the same Microsoft account. KNOWN LIMITS (we'd rather tell you first) It compares images, it does not understand scenes: a real crop, a collage, a cropped panorama, a photo taken OF a screen and an arbitrary tilt (7°) are out of reach — the rotation it covers is the eight symmetries of the square. A single blurry photo never enters a plan: sharpness is only compared between members of a stack that already exists for another reason. HEIC, RAW, WebP and video depend on the Windows codec extension — the app probes BEFORE it starts, names the extension that fixes it and counts how many files were left out, because "I could not look" must never become "I looked and found nothing". Photos that exist only in the cloud are indexed by metadata and are not opened without your order, because opening downloads the whole file. Video stacks are rebuilt every session: yesterday's stacks that reappear at launch are the photo ones. And there is no automation that deletes on its own — not scheduled, not from the command line: the windowless mode only READS and writes a report next to the folder.