Organizing and finding duplicates

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Guest

In a well-intentioned series of events I have ended up with many duplicates
and many different places where my pictures and film clips reside - on my
hard drive, three external drives, and many DVDs and CDs. I want to
eventually weed these pictures out and get them organized and located in one
place. For this I have PhotoShop Elements.

One problem is that in my zeal to never lose a picture, I have made copies
and they are scattered all over the place.

Does anyone know of software that can scan a photo and tell if it is the
same as another? That sounds like a wild idea, but maybe someone has
invented such a software program.

I am pretty sure I will be able to locate and organize the photos, but more
than likely I will have to rename them. The duplicates are going to end up
with different numbers unless I can eliminate. I can try and look at all of
the photos and get rid of the dupes, but that is going to take many months of
work.

l await any answers that can help.

George
 
Georgew6 said:
In a well-intentioned series of events I have ended up with many
duplicates and many different places where my pictures and film clips
reside - on my hard drive, three external drives, and many DVDs and
CDs. I want to eventually weed these pictures out and get them
organized and located in one place. For this I have PhotoShop
Elements.

One problem is that in my zeal to never lose a picture, I have made
copies and they are scattered all over the place.

Does anyone know of software that can scan a photo and tell if it is
the same as another? That sounds like a wild idea, but maybe someone
has invented such a software program.

I am pretty sure I will be able to locate and organize the photos,
but more than likely I will have to rename them. The duplicates are
going to end up with different numbers unless I can eliminate. I can
try and look at all of the photos and get rid of the dupes, but that
is going to take many months of work.

l await any answers that can help.

George
Click to expand...
==============================
Doing a Google search for:
"Find Duplicate Pictures"
yields lots of hits, the following freebie is
one example.

Dup Detector freeware version 3.0
http://www.keronsoft.com/dupdetector.html

More info:

The Digital Image Library that is included
in MS Digital Image Suite has an option
called: "Find Similar Pictures and Videos".
It will also scan your system for image files
and import them into the Library.

There's a 60 day trial version available for
download if you would like to give it a try:

Microsoft Digital Image
Starter Edition 2006
http://tinyurl.com/28loxr
(this product line has been
discontinued but you can still
down-load the Starter Version
and run it for 60 days)

Unlike the retail version...the trial does not
have the ability to create VCDs and it does
not include the clipart and pre-formatted
projects.

If you like the software...some retailers may
still have copies of the most recent version
available: Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
Anniversary Edition

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! -
Digital Image MVP

Digital Image
Highlights and FAQs
http://tinyurl.com/aczzp

Notice
This is not tech support
I am a volunteer

Solutions that work for
me may not work for you

Proceed at your own risk
 
Hi Again John,

I tried one program, PhotoSort (Demo) that detected the duplicate pictures.
The Demo did not let me finish anything else, but it appears to work OK. I
asked the author what do I do next. I have lots of discs and hard drives with
pictures and think that I will have to get them all in one place to use the
program effectively. The author agrees with me and says, as I read his email,
that I should run the program two or three times with different sensitivity
settings to be sure to remove only duplicates. In some cases I suppose this
is true, but many of the pictures are not important enough to worry about
"close" lookalikes.

One other problem though will be all the manual work involved in and
necessary to first locate all the pictures, then finding the duplicates,
deleting them, and getting the final pictures, not only in one place, but
organized correctly. I guess I will use Photoshop Elements 5 (Photoshop
Album) that I think is good.

I do want to check out the Microsoft program you mentioned before going with
this one and will look for it now.

George
 
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