Duplicate finder?

A VERY GOOD NEW YEAR TO ONE AND ALL,

Hi to all you good people; Does anyone out there in snappyland know of any software that finds / compares duplcate images?

Do you mean on your computer or the internet?

Hello Ken,
I mean on my computer; I seem to have accumalated quite a lot of duplicates,some with differing names/numbers. I would like to find a way of assimilating matching images so that I can check to be sure to delete by picture matc rather than by name or number.

Any idea's::

I use Easy Duplicate Finder link, but it really only works when the file name hasn't been changed. Up side, it's free

They do have another product - Duplicate Photo Finder - which I have't tried, but I think you have to pay for it, AND it doesn't support RAW files

Years ago I used a Perl script called findimagedupes which worked spectacularly well. When my collection of images grew to more than a gigabyte or so, I combined it with a program of my own which found and deleted exact file duplicates on a first run.

That was on a Linux computer, however. But in the Linux world there are a few free image management programs which have duplicate image finding built in, I'm sure the Windows world must have at least one.

Why not just use the Windows Search facility?

Because then you need to know which images have a duplicate. The point of dupe finder software is that it will just produce a list of all the duplicate files, including the ones you never knew about. This type of software is fairly common for general computer use (general documents, but especially music) to try and prevent wasted disk space.

Bob - you mention different file names - do you mean something that will actually look at the picture and find similar ones? I've got an idea there is something that does but you might need one of these to run it. A couple of suggestions though. When I produce multiple versions of a picture I name them with a suffix eg IMGP1234, IMGP1234a. If you do this, then arranging icons by name will find them. If you show the pictures as thumbnails and arrange by file size this will also highlight some duplications. Neither method is perfect though.

Hi John,
I did'nt know this facility could be used for this particular application;
Please would you explain to me how this would be done?

Thank's, Regards,
Larry.

What I had in mind was maybe where someone makes other versions of an image. Just go Start>Search and select image files and search using part of the file name so that it picks up all the variants.

So, for example, "Jenny at Sea" and "Jenny at Sea Web Version" would both be found looking up "Jenny at"

Sometimes we buy software when something useable is already built into Windows for free. It all depends what we are trying to find in this case.

I do sometimes use this search facility, but not often as I usually know where something is to be found.

Hi again John,

My problem is that some time ago a freind set me up with an external 500 Gig hard drive to back-up my computer; What I was too daft to grasp,being new to computers, was that every time I backed up everything was stored again, whether it was altered or not!
In many cases I had worked on or altered / re-named images or items and suddenly my 500 Gig was full! But in very many cases items / images were duplicated 2, 3, 4 or even 5 times and copied into differing files! And often with different number or name tags.

Bob, see my earlier post in this thread. Used Easy Duplicate Finder to resolve identical problem. Works simultaneously across multiple drives.

Thanks JohnX,
I'll give it a go.

I have this problem too, but didn't want to admit it

I made copies of SD cards to clear them before re-use. then backed the copies up, then had back ups of the back ups. I probably have a few gig of copies!!

But then, I never was very tidy, either in "real life" or with files on my PC

The software I referred to above - 'findimagedupes' - does that, ie it actually examines the image, so that it will report images which are visually similar despite not being represented in identical files. Ran quite happily on a 1999 Pentium II with 96MB of memory, I'm happy to report - supercomputer not required. It did take several hours to run on that machine over a collection of a couple of gig of images, however.

BTW an admin might want to delete kangyu's post, above.