HELP! Automatically delete duplicate photos!

[Simon5282]

I have been taking photos of my family for almost a decade, but I have been to lazy to take care of them. So I'd just copy them to hard drives to back up, and forget them. Every dozen or so months I would copy photos from others, or copy photos to a computer, or to another hard drive, with the intention to organize them.

I copied all the photos to a single hard drive and then imported them to iPhoto thinking that iPhoto would take one of each photo. (yea, go ahead and laugh at me now.) I was wrong.

Ten years of finger happiness (I have four kids) and procrastination has resulted in nearly 200K photos and 400 GB. Does anyone have any experience with software that can delete duplicate photos? Anything that anyone would pay for? I think that I probably only have about 10k real photos and the rest are unorganized duplicates. It can be for Mac or PC because I use both. I just want to click a button and come back several hours later and be done with it.

Thanks!

 

[cr2]

Apreture 3?

Aperture 3 has option of "not" to import duplicate photos. I have not tired it before but it would be worth a try. I love Aperture, many steps above iPhoto and very easy to use too. For $79 (or if you have discounted iTunes card then less) it is a steal.

I would suggest you to give it a try. Import few photos at a time and do some trial and error before starting a big batch job.

All the best.

 

[Simon5282]

Thanks, One more thing though, it would have to analyze the photos based on photos themselves, and not just on file names. I'm sure this is possible because iPhoto can analyze photos to pick out faces.

I appreciate the suggestion.

 

[MisterMe]

... I just want to click a button and come back several hours later and be done with it.

Thanks!

iPhoto and other photo download utilities can be be set to download only photographs that haven't already been downloaded. In the case of iPhoto, this setting is the default. It will prevent duplicate photographs in the first place. Now that you have duplicates, there is no reliable way to automatically eliminate duplicate photographs and only duplicate photographs. I can think of no duplicate photograph problem that is serious enough to risk losing precious memories to false positives.