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iBunny

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 15, 2004
1,254
0
Does this exist?

I have a bunch of pictures, thousands and thousands. I have many many duplicates, but they have different file names.

Is their any program, Script, or Automator action? that can search them all, and find out which ones are the same and delete the duplicate?
 
Hmm I doubt it. Programs usually go by metadata or file names -- duplicate file names can be found, but the same photo with different names is tricky.

I just had to go through a lot of my pictures, re-naming, deleting duplicates -- all manually. I'm not done yet, but getting there.


The only thing I can think of is a program that somehow scans all photos, and displays all with certain attributes (ie: Dimensions) but that would seem ineffective as it may display a poop load of other things with the same dimensions.


My advice is to Organize them. Separate them into folders based on type, class, or whatever you like.

I did a folder for cool 3D wallpapers and scenery, one for photos of myself, one for photos of my neice, one for photos of each pet I own, etc..

Once in there, I Go through each one and give them a file name. For instance, in the folder for wallpapers and other cool stuff, I have one heck of a lot of space-themed pictures.

I go through each one and name it "Space 1" "Space 2" etc... Once I have them all named appropiately, I simply scroll through each one in Xee.app (cool replacement for Preview) and delete any duplicates I see. (there is a handy delete button in the app)

I then move on to the next section named "Ocean 1" "Ocean 2" all with Ocean based themes, and so on.


Renamer4Mac also helps me out when selecting a large amount of photos and deleting or adding characters to all file names. I drag all my cat photos in, select add to position 1, type "Bagheera - " and then re-name. Now every photo of my cat begins with the name "Bagheera - " Leaving me free to examine and name the photos to my liking.
 
A program like TidyUp can compare the size of pics via checksums and assuming that no two pictures are exactly the same size those that are will therefore be duplicates.

But it's long shot, though you can also tell it to compare creation date, exif data and stuff like that to narrow down the chance of it finding dupes.
 
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