Find & Merge Duplicate Images Safely

Yes. Instead of blindly deleting, the merge step first repoints every reference - post content, featured images, WooCommerce galleries, Elementor, ACF, logo and site icon - to the copy you keep, then trashes only the redundant ones.

It deliberately keeps the copy that's actually referenced somewhere on your site and merges the others into it. Nothing in use is removed, so your live pages keep rendering the same image.

Removed duplicates go to the ThumbPress trash rather than being permanently deleted, so you can restore anything before you clear it for good.

No, and that is deliberate. Only byte-identical files are grouped, so a cropped or re-saved version of a photo is treated as its own image and is never merged away without you asking.

Content hashes are generated once in the background and stored against each image, so finding duplicates afterwards is a single indexed lookup rather than a full pass over your uploads folder.

The hash is always taken from the original file, never a scaled copy. That keeps the comparison meaningful and stops WordPress-generated sizes producing false matches.

It depends how long the library has been running and how many people upload to it, but multi-author and long-lived sites routinely find hundreds of megabytes of exact copies sitting unused.