Duplicate photos on hard drive

[didikai]

I sem to remembe a program, or a feature on a program that scans your hard drive and picks out any photos that have been duplicated.
Is there one, and does it work?

[redwudz]

There are quite a few 'duplicate file finder' programs around, some freeware. I've used a couple, but it's been a while so I don't recall the names. You can find some by doing a internet search. I wouldn't use one to automatically delete duplicate files as they often make mistakes.

But if it just lists the duplicates, then you can decide to keep or toss them. Photos should be easy enough to check. Where I ran into problems was when several folders had the same titles for the photos and they were the same size as they were batch converted. I wiped out quite a few photos that weren't duplicates, but I fortunately had them backed up to DVD data discs.

[wtsinnc]

Glary utilities is freeware and has a number of useful tools for cleaning and analysis.
It has a duplicate files finder which I've used but I can't compare it's effectiveness versus other possible choices; it works for me.

http://www.glaryutilities.com/

[wtsinnc]

didikai;

Here's another possible choice.

Never used it, but it's freeware (open source) and is designed to search for photos on the hard drive.
It's a Google app, so that could be good or bad.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_picasa/

[yoda313]

I'd just issue a word of caution. Don't delete any too soon. Sometimes I've made crops and resizes of photos. It's quite possible these types of scanners would misread the original file as the duplicate. If that happened than you could delete the original by mistake and be left with a shrunk image and lose the original quality.

Now I dont' know how they work but this is possible. I'd just look at filesize before deleting. Chances are the original file will be significantly larger than any copies.

That is just a word of caution before going too far.