Sift

Find what's eating
your disk — safely.

A local-only desktop app that finds duplicate files, similar photos, empty folders, and your biggest space-eaters. Everything you remove goes into a quarantine you can restore from — clean up without fear.

Download for Windows View source
~16 MB zip. Unzip and double-click sift.exe — no installer, no Python. Close the window to exit. First launch may show a Windows SmartScreen warning — click More info → Run anyway.

What it finds

Duplicate files

Byte-identical files found by SHA-256, with a three-tier filter that's fast even on TB-scale folders.

Similar photos

Spot burst shots, resized copies, and slight crops via perceptual hashing. Pick the keepers, the rest are gone.

Empty folders

Recursively-empty directory trees, with optional handling of junk metadata like Thumbs.db.

Largest items

Top-N files and folders by recursive size. Answers "where did all my space go?" at a glance.

Built for trust

Quarantine by default

Nothing is unlinked until you opt in. Restorable with one click via the manifest file.

Local-only

Web UI served from 127.0.0.1; no network calls, no telemetry, no uploads. Your files never leave your machine.

Re-validates before deleting

File size and hash are re-checked at execute time. If a file changed since the scan, it's skipped — never silently overwritten or removed.

Protected paths

Mark folders that should never be deleted from, even when their contents match a duplicate group.