Locating Duplicate Images on Your Computer

I travel all over the world and I take too many pictures. The pictures I take are on a digital camera. I used to use a 35mm camera, but I never knew if the picture was a good one until I had it developed at a great cost, especially if it was out of focus. When digital cameras came out, I thought those days were over. Now I had a possibly greater problem emerging.

What happened was that I found myself putting the same images in different folders on my computer in case something happened to one folder; I had the image in another one. I would make .pdf documents that would hold up to 24 images in a slide show. Now I had the images in the .pdf folder, the Adobe folder and the folder I created for the location I was when I took the pictures. Sometimes they would be in other folders too if I saved them without paying attention to what folder they I saved them to.

Sometimes I download the photos on my memory card but do not delete them in case I want them to print out at a store. Then, when I take more pictures and download the memory card, I have the same photos but now they are also in a different directory. My computer is loaded with photos that take up a lot of room. With over 20 GB of images, if I want to get rid of duplicate images, I will have to go through every folder in every picture location and look one by one for each image. That is ridiculous. That could take forever and I am sure I would miss some. So what do I do?

There are programs out there you can download free, and others that you can pay for to find and delete duplicate photos. They can use the name of the photo if you have gone through and given each photo a name, but most pictures on a memory card are listed by a number on the photo that co-relates to the number of the picture taken on that memory card. If your digital camera has the option to continuously number the photos on that card, when you download them, put them all in the same file and when it asks if you want overwrite photos already in that file, click yes and any photos on the computer already will not be duplicated.

Some programs on the market today can find a duplicate photo on your computer by image recognition. They actually can find a duplicate by comparing the image on the photo and not the number. Google's Picasa software will detect duplicate photos by comparing file sizes and names first. If these match, it will then scan a small portion of each file's code to determine if they match. If they do, the duplicate will not download into the Picasa database.

There is a program, CloneSpy, which is a free download for Windows that will compare the contents of files on your computer by checking the checksum. It will not matter if they have different names, the program looks for content in the file. If it is text and word documents, you want to compare, use WinMerge, and Mac users use Mr. Clean.