Sorting through photos and deleting duplicates

Question

I'm looking to easily find duplicate photos of what's already on my laptop and delete those photos from my external hard drive.

Before I got an external hard drive with 160GB to dump photos from my PowerShot to, I downloaded them to my laptop which at the time only had 60GB.

When I upgraded my laptop harddrive to a matching 160GB, I went back to downloading them to the laptop instead and organized them into a year/month/day folder structure. Eventually I stopped dumping to the external drive.

Problem is I have 16 folders still on my external that mostly stretch from one date to the last.
e.g.: August_19_2008-September_13_2008

I'm using Windows XP, so a Windows supported solution would be nice. If I had to I could use a Linux app since I dual-boot Ubuntu 9.04.

I don't really need image comparison power, but just regular file comparison power for the most part.

Answer 1

i'm using Total Commander (the one program i can't do without :) for such jobs.

open the 2 drives/folders in question

Commands > Sync Dirs

click 'Compare', when done hit 'duplicates', now select the lot and delete either left or right, depending on the drive you want to remove the duplicates from.

Total Commander is shareware, try before you buy.

note: you may not want to buy the program just for this job, but if you already have it then you don't need anything else. it's just one of its 1000 useful features.

if, however you need more than just a duplicate file name finder, you may want to have a closer look at VisiPics which will also search and compare similar images.

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.

VisiPics is freeware (donationware to be precise).

Answer 2

It will be easy only if you have not edited the copies (changing them).

1. You could use a Duplicate File Finder to locate duplicates.
   • check this other question on finding duplicate files in Windows
   • You could also use 'md5sum' to get checksums for all the files and then weed-out duplicate sums
   • there are some tools that do this,
     but, its quite easy if you will do a little scripting
     Here is one reference for the Windows MD5Sum Tool.
     Here is another for a Powershell md5sum script.

Answer 3

Picasa has a search for duplicated photos option.

You can:

1. Temporarily install Picasa
2. Let it index all your photos
3. Search for duplicated photos and delete them.
4. Uninstall Picasa and you're done!