Duplicate Photo Finder

You can use CCLeaner (https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download) to find duplicates.

1. Download the app
2. Install it
3. Run it
4. Click on the Tools icon
5. Match by Size and Content
6. Select drives you want search
7. Start search

Duplicate files will be listed, you can select and delete from the duplicate files.

I use Photo Duplicates Cleaner on my Mac to do this. It’s quick and easy to use. And it’s free.

I’m in the midst of the exact same project, with tens of thousands of duplicate photos. I spent some time researching various tools, including CCleaner, Duplicate File Finder by Ashisoft (I have an older licensed version), and others. I settled on dupeGuru Picture Edition v2.10.1. It’s free and can be downloaded directly from the developer’s site here. I’m using it on Windows 10 Pro.

Many of my duplicates have different resolutions. So a bitwise comparison would say they are not duplicates, but in fact they are the same image with different resolutions. I chose dupeGuru PE because it has clever logic that recognizes these as duplicates. It’s CPU- and disk-intensive because each image file must be read, so if you have tens of thousands of images it can take several hours to complete its scan, depending on your hardware. The tool then lets me set criteria for which duplicate to keep, while deleting the rest (I keep the one with the highest resolution).

If you don’t need the CPU-intensive analysis like me, you can tell the tool to use other criteria to identify duplicates, which will run much faster.  Besides the usual file size/date comparison that all dedupe tools have, dupeGuru PE can also use EXIF timestamps.

The Windows version of dupeGuru PE is from 2014, but it does everything I need. According to his website, the developer stopped upgrading the Windows version and focuses on Linux now. But the final Windows version 2.10.1 is still available for download.

If you’re using Mac, I’ve had good results with Gemini – freed up about 80GB on my 600GB drive. It’ll find any kind of dupe and suggest which one to keep. It’ll also pick similar photos so you don’t need to keep all 10 of the shots of the same scene, just the best one.

I would recommend ThumbsPlus from Cerious Software.

It creates thumbnails of all your images and you can apply keywords, edit metadata, and there is a ’Find Similar’ function that has a slider that lets you set just ’how’ similar the images have to be, to be returned. From there you can decide which images to keep and which to trash. It can be a slow process — but it does find the similar images.

It can be hard to find a good duplicate finder/killer because there’s a lot of cruft out there, and a lot of marketing, and some of the program names are rather generic sounding.

I’ve settled on Digital Volcano’s Duplicate Cleaner Pro. It can find exact or ”similar” matches, with criteria you choose (how similar, rotated, resized, etc.), and several levels of file hashing for exact matches. It can find matches regardless of file names. There are Image and Music modes, with tools tailored to each category of files. You can delete or move duplicates. You can set folders as ”protected”, and it won’t let you delete files in those folders.

The free version does a lot, but you get more bells and whistles with the paid version – mostly more powerful search & filter options. I used the free version for a long time before I decided I wanted the extra features, and it has been well worth the $30.

https://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/duplicatecleaner.html

I think this app is more of a file comparison tool rather than a true ”duplicate finder” for OSX. VisualDiffer. It allows you to compare two folders side by side then look at name, size, timestamp. You can apply the filters to nail down what you want. I have some of the other programs mentioned above, but sometimes want to do things at slower pace when deleting mp3’s and photos. FWIW I am still running OSX 10.6.8

 

http://visualdiffer.com/

If you’re looking for a program that will visually identify duplicate photos (using the digital image comparison process rather than comparing the file name, size, etc.) then the best program I have found is Visipics.  It only finds photo duplicates, however.

VisiPics does more than just look for identical files, it goes beyond checksums to look for similar pictures and does it all with a simple user interface. First, you select the root folder or folders to find and catalogue all of your pictures. It then applies five image comparison filters in order to measure how close pairs of images on the hard drive are.

Visipic is a program that is considerably faster than any other commercial product and has an interface that let you do other things while Visipics automatically finds your duplicated images. It will detect two different resolution files of the same picture as a duplicate, or the same picture saved in different formats, or duplicates where only minor cosmetic changes have taken place.

All detected duplicates are shown side by side with pertinent information such as file name, type and size being displayed. Its auto-select mode let you choose if you want to keep the higher resolution picture, space-saving filetype, smaller filesize or all of the above. If you are insecure over what you really want to delete you can manually select the images you don’t want to keep and delete them yourself.  You can find out more about Visipics at:

http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

I’ve settled on Ashisoft Duplicate Photo Finder. It can find exact or ”similar” matches, with criteria you choose (how similar, rotated, resized, etc.), and several levels of file hashing for exact matches. It can find matches regardless of file names.