Find And Delete Duplicate Pictures and Photographs

In our digital era shooting and editing digital photos is part of our daily life. Unfortunately we rarely keep a well organized database. We copy images to temporary locations in different formats that we needed at certain points of our work and forget to delete them. Searching for a photograph by its content was an impossible task for a computer so soon we are going out of storage. In such situations what comes extremely handy is a product developed by MindGems Inc.

I am going to introduce you here – Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder. Though a bit long, the name of the product describes it perfectly well. The product will find similar images regardless of the file name, format, image size and bit depth. Image processing is a heavy task and the performance achieved by this application is incredible. It manages to scan thousands of images in few minutes. I got also some information from the company about a new feature that will be available in the upcoming version. A photo search option. It will let you search for images by a sample. You will no longer have to search for your wedding photos. Do you remember that photo you mailed to John? Just load it in Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder and it will find the rest of the images for you. A very nice feature that will let you find the rest of the images from the set by loading a single sample.

Many professionals and also advanced photographers take images in RAW format. The quality of the RAW images is much better compared to JPEG, but the drawback is the size and the fact that very small amount of products supports it. The good news here is that Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder will provide also a RAW support soon for all the popular camera brands available on the market.

I must admit also the vast variety of image formats that it supports. Here is a complete list:

• JPEG Bitmap (*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.jpe)
• Compuserve Bitmap (*.gif)
• Portable Network Graphics (*.png)
• TIFF Bitmap (*.tif;*.tiff;*.fax;*.g3n;*.g3f)
• JPEG2000 Files (*.jp2)
• JPEG2000 Code Stream (*.j2k;*.jpc;*.j2c)
• Targa (*.tga;*.targa;*.vda;*.icb;*.vst;*.pix)
• Paintbrush (*.pcx)
• Windows Bitmap (*.bmp;*.dib;*.rle)
• Windows Metafile (*.wmf)
• Enhanced Windows Metafile (*.emf)
• Windows Icon (*.ico)
• Windows Cursor (*.cur)
• Wireless Bitmap (*.wbmp)
• Portable Pixmap (*.pxm;*.ppm)
• Adobe Photoshop (*.psd)

You can download a fully functional demo at the company web site – Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder.

Also do not miss to check out the detailed Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder tutorial page

Free Duplicate File Finder

Sometimes when you have a lot of different types of data on a hard drive, it’s easy for files to get mixed up and you forget which files contain which information. Hard drive space is valuable, but sometimes it’s very easy to get multiple files that contain the same information. Normally, your system won’t recognize this, nor will it do anything to cut down on the use of hard drive space. All the system really looks at is the filename, rather than the contents. This is done because sometimes people want to create backup files, but often it ends up just using more space than is needed. Fast Duplicate File Finder is a program that can help to find duplicate files on your hard drive.

Fast Duplicate File Finder works by looking at the binary code – all the 0s and 1s that make up your file and searching for similar code instances between files. It’s a simple matter of specifying file extensions and previewing the contents of the files. Fast Duplicate File Finder supports plenty of different file types – text, video, image and music files can all be previewed within the easy-to-use interface. After you scan for a particular file, the program will pull up a menu, informing you of other files that matched its own code and marking them to be deleted. You can specify which file types or subfolders should be excluded from this marking, which means you don’t have to worry about accidentally deleting files you wanted to keep. Mainly, this applies to system folders where most of your operating system files and drivers are kept. If these are accidentally deleted, the machine would malfunction and Fast Duplicate File Finder protects those files by default.

When duplicate files are found, you can move them to the Recycle Bin, move them to their own folder or simply delete them from the hard drive entirely. Not only can this software can find duplicate files on standard hard drives, it can work with network folders and removable storage devices such as CDs, DVDs or USB Flash drives.

This doesn’t have to interfere with your work either – the software is capable of scanning your computer during idle time by setting its process to the lowest priority. Fast Duplicate File Finder will run on all Windows operating systems. To install the program, you should have minimum 128 MB of RAM and 2 MB of hard drive space.