Digital Home Thoughts: Duplicate Finder 2.0

If you have a large collection of any type of digital media, whether it be photos or music, odds are you'll end up with duplicates. Hard drives are so big nowadays, it's not so much a matter of saving space as it is having a neat and organized library of digital data. I posted about this exact problem earlier and Filip suggested I try Duplicate Finder 2.0. The user interface isn't very polished, but all in all the program works quite well - it's very fast, chewing through 13,000 or so MP3/WMA files in about ten seconds on my AMD 3500+ machine. It sorts the results in a list that shows the folder location, file size, and other data, and lists the duplicates in clusters. This makes it fast and easy to press the space bar to tag the duplicate you want to remove, then at the end of the process you can delete all the tagged files at once. You can also chose to move the duplicates to another folder instead of deleting them if you're extra paranoid about data loss.

It can also be used for finding duplicate photos. Using it on 9500 or so photos and set to find duplicates based on byte size, I was surprised at the number of duplicates I had! I pride myself on my well-organized photo collection, so this was a rather rude surprise. ;-) There's a pop-up picture viewer, but it doesn't resize based on aspect ratio so you end up with distorted pictures. All in all this is a fairly useful tool, though I find it a bit overpriced at $26 USD. If you have a messy digital media collection with a lot of duplicates, this is a useful tool.