Sunday, October 19, 2008
I Need a Good Duplicate Image Finder
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 03:00 AM
Digital Home Thoughts readers, I need your help. I'm looking for a tool that will, in batch mode, analyze a bunch of images (JPEG and RAW) and allow me to quickly and easily purge the duplicates. Through some incredibly bad image management and workflow decisions on my part, I've ended up with 17,092 images from my Hawaii vacation back in 2006...it's a long story. Probably 75% of those are duplicates, and I want a fast way to purge them all. I was hoping that Lightroom 2's import (which has a "Detect Duplicates" function) would help ease the pain, but it imported 17.078 images - it turns out it only detects duplicates based on file name, not on file attribute or EXIF data. I tried ACDSee Pro's duplicate detection, but it forces you to go through each duplicate set one by one, which would take me hours. I tried another tool called Easy Duplicate Finder, but it also required manual clicking on each duplicate file. I need a tool that will analyze the images, decide which is a duplicate, then let me delete all the duplicates at once. Freeware would be preferable, but I'm so desperate to finish these photos I'll pay for a good tool. Suggestions?