Czkawka: A Fast File-cleanup Tool Written in Rust

When disk space quietly fills up, the culprit is usually duplicate files, similar photos, or empty folders nobody remembers creating. Czkawka is an open-source cleanup tool written in Rust that finds duplicate files, empty folders, oversized files, similar images and audio/video, broken links, and corrupted files. The code is almost entirely safe Rust, and it runs fully offline without collecting any data. GitHubDaily recommended it in January 2025.

Core features

• Duplicate file detection: compares files layer by layer on name, size, or hash to find identical copies.
• Similar media recognition: detects visually similar images even with watermarks or different resolutions, videos with similar footage, and music matched by tags or content.
• Empty folders and large files: lists empty directories, empty files, temporary files, and the largest files by size.
• Corrupted file detection: finds broken symlinks, invalid or corrupted files, and files whose content doesn’t match their extension.
• Cache-accelerated scans: the first scan’s results are cached, making subsequent scans noticeably faster.
• Multiple front ends: the core logic is packaged as the czkawka_core library, on top of which sit the Slint-based Krokiet interface, the older GTK4 interface, a CLI, and the Android app Cedinia, plus Python bindings.

Typical use cases

• Freeing up disk space: bulk-removing duplicate files, large files, empty directories, and temp files.
• Organizing a media library: cleaning up similar or watermarked images and duplicate music.
• Automation and development: hooking scans into scripts or scheduled jobs via the CLI, or building your own tool on top of the core library.

Quick start

1. Download a prebuilt package for your platform from the GitHub Releases page (macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu are all available) and unzip it to use;

2. Or install the new interface via Cargo:

   cargo install krokiet --locked
   

3. Similar-video detection and related features require ffmpeg to be installed separately (brew install ffmpeg on macOS).

Summary

Czkawka suits everyday users who want to clear disk clutter, as well as developers who need to run bulk scans or build on the core library; the project remains actively maintained. Note the licensing split: the core library, GTK interface, and CLI are MIT, while Krokiet and the Android app are GPL-3.0-only due to their Slint dependency; the older GTK4 interface is frozen at version 12.0, with the official recommendation to switch to Krokiet; some image formats need extra native libraries that aren’t included in the Windows prebuilt package. The project also has no official website — its only official channels are the GitHub repo, Releases, crates.io, and Flathub, so stick to those when downloading. Overall, it’s a practical, fully offline, on-device tool.