Here’s the irony. One of the many perks of owning a smartphone is that you can take many photos with the built-in camera. One of the many disadvantages is the ability to take many photos with the built-in camera.
Why is having a smartphone camera both good and bad? Because now anyone can press the shutter button without thinking about the camera film and development costs, which leads to you going crazy and making ten copies of the same pose or the same scene, and then transferring all the mess to your computer or cloud storage.
I’m the worst offender. For 6 years that we have owned a dog, we have taken (by conservative estimates) about 10,000 photographs of him. But I estimate that about half of these photos are duplicates.
How to get rid of duplicate photos without looking through them one by one? As usual, there is a tool for that.
Enter Awesome Photo Finder
There are many photo copying tools available on the Internet. However, pretty much everything I tried (and there were many) had a extremely limited trial. Then they demanded that you pay a huge amount for the license fee.
But here’s the problem. I’m Scots, which means spending money isn’t in my DNA. I needed a free solution and I eventually found it, although it is Windows only and looks a little outdated. But the main thing is that he does his job.
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It’s called Awesome Photo Finder
Find Phishers
We got our dog in 2013, so I’m going to run the 2013 dogs folder with the Awesome Photo Finder and see how many duplicates it finds.
When you first open Awesome Photo Finder, click the “+” icon.
Now navigate to the folder and / or subfolder containing the images you want to scan.
When you’ve selected a folder, it will appear in the box at the top of the Photo Finder.
You can add as many folders as you like for a single search, so use “+” as many times as you need. If you choose to remove any of the folders from the Photo Finder, use the X icon.
I’m only going to create one folder at a time, so after selecting a folder, I click Start Search.
Obviously, the time it takes to perform a duplicate search will depend on the number of images in the folder. For me, 1163 images took just over a minute.
When it finishes, you will see the following:
He will place two photos side by side and give you a “similarity” score in the middle. The higher the rating, the more the images look the same (according to Photo Finder).
In Settings, you can specify that it only gives you “100% identical” results. This is useful, but rather inflexible. I would prefer to say “something 90% or more identical.” Or so.
While this one only claims 25% similarity, I would say it looks VERY identical. The only real difference is the position of the dog’s head.
So for many of them, this is your verdict. How do you define “duplicate”?
When you’ve decided which one to delete, first look at the image size data under each photo. Make sure you don’t leave a thumbnail or throw away the full size image!
As you can see, you can move the unwanted image to another location on your computer or delete it.
If you want to see 100% duplicate images first and work your way down, click the Similarity column at the bottom of the screen. The results will now be collected again.
Now you will get truly identical in every way.
Some closing thoughts….
The lazy among us may be tempted to just let a software application do its job and automatically remove what it considers “duplicates”. But with something as valuable as photos, do you really want him to just delete things without first checking?
This is one of those things where going through them methodically pays dividends. The program has done a great job of finding duplicates. All you have to do is decide who will leave and which will stay.
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