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Search and destroy duplicate images

Nick

Nick

  • Updated:

similar_imagesIf you’ve got a big photo collection, managing your images can be tough enough. It’s even harder when duplicate images, created either accidentally by yourself or by Windows, invade your collection. One option is to simply trawl through each album and weed out the duplicates. This is obviously time consuming and can be painstakingly difficult if you’ve got several very similar images or if your files are labelled with very similar names.

Don’t tear your hair out, though, because help is at hand from SimilarImages, a program that does much of the hard work for you. SimilarImages has a graphics engine which searches the contents of your images and computes the differences between them. The degree of difference you want the program to search for can be set according to your needs and it’s remarkably accurate.

SimilarImages starts by conducting a comprehensive scan of your hard drive which can take several hours if you’ve got thousands of images.We suggest you start with just one folder, to begin with. Images are then displayed side by side, along with data on their file size and resolution. From here, you can choose which one to keep and which to delete. If you are impressed with the results and feel the program has detected exactly the right duplicates to delete, you can set SimilarImages to delete files automatically. This method cuts out the hassle of going through the results and is best configured using the images’ creation dates because most duplicate images are generated after the original was saved on your PC. Just tell SimilarImages to delete older duplicates and you’ll have cleaned up your collection in no time!

Be very careful, however, that the program is detecting the images you want to delete and not your precious originals! Either way, we recommend you backup your images before using this program, just to be safe.

Nick

Nick

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