SimilarImagesFinder — It’s time to clean house

Topic

New Reply

FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen I’ve decided to stop looking at, and ignoring, that giant folder of pictures. Like with a cluttered closet, it’s
[See the full post at: SimilarImagesFinder — It’s time to clean house]

5 users thanked author for this post.

WSGeo, fisher75, abbodi86, Norio, lmacri

Reply | Quote

Replies

I am about to do similar cleanups as a Winter project, so thanks for highlighting this!

However…don’t discourage people from taking multiple shots! I find that the worst habit I’ve held over from film photography is consideration of the cost, thus not taking many shots. It’s almost impossible to take “the perfect shot” IRL. You have to take a bunch and hope that the good ones are in there. Still trying to re-train myself!

Reply | Quote

This similar free app is better and automatically selects the best quality version:
It’s called Find.Same.Images.OK and is regularly updated.
http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/Find.Same.Images.OK

Reply | Quote

I ran this from my desktop in my limited account but it comes up with folder view from Administrator account and is a REAL PAIN to get to my photos which are in a folder in my “Document” folder in my limited account!!!!!!!!!

Is there a better way to run this?

Reply | Quote

I downloaded this program and used the exact match and it worked great. Have been trying the non-exact option next and its taking a LONG time. Ran for hours comparing several folders on C: and also Dropbox. Cancelled and re-trying on C: folders only and still running for several hours. Deanna mentioned that option was “slow” but how long is slow? Thanks!

Reply | Quote

The folders that have pictures has ~14K files and occupies 23.2 GB. I selected exact match and subfolders. It’s been running for hours. Normal?

Reply | Quote

Deanna;

I look forward to reading each of your new articles- but wondered if there is a way to find your old article as well?  Often I will say to myself, “Deanna had a free program for this- but where is that article describing that free program”.

thank you for your clever & helpful articles

gary

Reply | Quote

Deanna’s articles are in the Newsletters. As a Plus Member, you have access to all the past Newsletters. There is a button at the top of the site for Newsletters/Alerts access, and a “Search Newsletters” searchbox in the right-hand pane.

You have to be logged in.

Reply | Quote

I’m all for keeping organized, but it’s a bit hard to imagine that it’s worth taking much time to try to reclaim storage when storage costs less than it ever has in history.

This year I got a new workstation and besides the 2 x 2 TB drives it came with I’ve since added 2 more cutting edge 4 TB drives. The bank is not broken. Even for those, which absorb and deliver back data at speeds well in excess of 10 GB / second, I paid only about $100 a TB (which is about 1/20 what solid state storage cost a scant 12 years ago).

Decent consumer-grade drives are now roughly half that price (yeah, $50ish per TB) on sale. Backup drives that don’t have to be screaming fast are even cheaper.

In my lifetime of photography as a hobby, scanning film in the last millennium, having moved to digital photography when it became a thing, upgrading to the latest camera tech pretty regularly, and shooting raw files forever, I’ve accumulated a whole 612 GB of photos. A veritable drop in a single 4 TB bucket. An even smaller drop in an 18 TB backup drive bucket.

How much is your time worth?

-Noel

Reply | Quote

I am curious to test and see if it can outperform my current favorite tool: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

It finds similar image & video, duplicate music, duplicate files, and more…

 

Reply | Quote

Does it outperform or are you just advertising?

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

I haven’t tried the tools mentioned here but I have been fighting with this problem quite a lot.

My favourite tools are Visipics and Anti-Twin. For some reason, Anti-Twin seems to be a rarity in that it lets you filter the outputs and select based on various characteristics. e.g. you can compare 2 directories and choose to delete ALL files in 1 of those directories that ONLY hav a duplicate in the other directory. You can further filter by date, file size, nesting depth and name format.
I use Visipics less these days but its UI is more useful for quick comparisons at a glance.

I’ve also tried VSDIF, which is quite useful even as a free trial.
I’ve even used BeyondCompare for some comparisons.

Why have I used so many programs you may ask? Well because I keep running into the issue that these damn things DON’T 100% match! I have encountered files where ALL these programs have told me they are 100% identical images when they weren’t!
You have to be VERY careful if you deal with a lot of different image formats, because apparently it’s extremely difficult to program duplicate finders.

Anti-Twin is by far the most useful though. I use it to clean non-image duplicates too.

I have yet to try czkawka but it’s been on my list for a while. Haven’t tried SimilarImagesFinder either but based on my experience, I can almost guarantee neither will have the features I desire of a duplicate image finder. When you’re dealing with thousands of images, you NEED filters and you NEED the confidence that 100% matches are in fact 100%. It needs to handle unicode filenames and it needs to handle PSD images.
It’s so hard to find a tool that does it all.

Reply | Quote