To find your duplicates, a tool has to look at every photo you have - family, documents, everything. That access is normal and necessary. Where the looking happens is the part worth choosing carefully.
People worry about the wrong thing with cleaner apps: the scan itself is harmless, because reading your files is literally the job. The honest privacy question is where the photos go while they are being read. A local tool reads them on your own machine, computes hashes there, and nothing leaves the PC. A cloud based cleaner uploads your photos to a server to compare them - which means your entire library now also lives somewhere you do not control, under someone else's policy. For most people the local route is simply the right default, and it is also how the method in the video works: scan on your device, decide on your device. This page lays out the difference, the permission requests that are normal, and the red flags that mean uninstall. The safety frame for deletes is unchanged: backup first, review before delete, stage deletes for a week.
A duplicate finder must open every photo file in the folders you point it at - there is no way to compare files it cannot read. On a PC that means ordinary file access to those folders. On a phone it means the photo library permission. Granting that to a reputable local tool is reasonable and expected. What the tool should never need: your contacts, your messages, your accounts on other services, or permission to run constantly in the background when you are not cleaning.
Local tools - the common kind for Windows and Mac - install on your machine and hash files there. Your photos never travel. If the company vanished tomorrow, your library is untouched.
Cloud cleaners ask you to upload the library, or sync it through their app, and compare on their servers. That can work well, but you are trusting their storage, their security and their deletion promises with the most personal files you own. Read who they are before a single photo moves. If a free tool's whole pitch requires uploading everything and the company behind it is unclear, that is not a bargain - that is the product being your photos.
A good finder shows its groups, lets you review, and lets you leave. Anything else is selling urgency, not cleaning.
For a home library, choose a local tool from a source you can identify, scan in exact match mode, review groups with your own eyes, and stage every delete for a week. Your photos stay on your machine, the decision stays in your hands, and the privacy question answers itself. Save cloud services for the job they are actually good at - being your off-site backup, under your account, on your terms.
The full cleanup, from the first scan to the final delete, is shown live in the video.
Watch Full VideoFor a local tool from an identifiable source, yes - it needs read access to the folders you choose in order to compare files, and the photos stay on your machine. Be careful with any service that uploads your whole library to its servers before showing results.
A photo tool needs photo access. Permissions like contacts, messages or background control of the phone are not needed for finding duplicates and are a red flag - deny them or choose a different tool.
They can be convenient for libraries already stored in that same cloud account, where no new upload is really happening. The problem case is a little known service asking you to upload a private library from your PC. Local tools avoid that trust question completely.