Photo Recovery

[Fed]

Over the weekend, I managed to totally trash one of my Mac OS X hard drives. Fortunately, with the help of some Data Recovery software, I managed to recover pretty much all of my data. However, with this gold mine, came 38,000 JPGs alone.

I'm going through them at the minute with Finder, organised them by size and got rid of a few thousand. What would be really good, is if there was a tool to recognise which photos are identical (in terms of the picture itself) and only keep the largest file size?

I was thinking about importing them into iPhoto but thought it may throw a hissy fit (given it's so many pictures) and mess up my library in the process? On top of that, I don't want it writing a bunch of other image variants for it's own optimisation processes.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Use DupeGuru or Find Duplicate Files or Decloner to scan for and delete duplicate files.
More can be found here.

If that does not help, you can always create a new iPhoto Library (in order to not mess up your current one) and uncheck the "Copy items" checkbox in iPhoto > Preferences > Advanced to disable the copying of the photos into the Libray file.

 

[Fed]

Use DupeGuru or Find Duplicate Files or Decloner to scan for and delete duplicate files.
More can be found here.

If that does not help, you can always create a new iPhoto Library (in order to not mess up your current one) and uncheck the "Copy items" checkbox in iPhoto > Preferences > Adavcned to disable the copying of the photos into the Libray file.

Fantastic. Thanks for the quick response as well

EDIT: Decloner is very impressive software!
EDIT1: Actually it found 1,600 duplicates and yet a quick scroll in Finder shows it's missed a lot. Hm, onto the next then.

 

[wolfpuppies3]

For the future

I have about 38,000 images stored on an external 1TB drive backed up to another. I use Time Machine backing up the computer itself every hour and CC Cloner backing the entire drive up daily to another external drive, all of which is automated. One back up drive is kept off site nightly. Paranoid? No. I have lost hard drives. To lightning, to age, for no reason at all.

Once burned, twice cautious.