While storage has gotten cheaper and larger, in some sense it only makes keeping the increased number of files organized more difficult. Without the need to decide what to throw away, it’s easier to just buy higher capacity storage. I know that has certainly become the way for some of my files. They have been migrated from multiple computers, backed up during multiple OS upgrades and repairs, and lost any semblance of organization as I changed my mind for folder structures or where to save things.
Needless to say, I have some spring cleaning I need to do with my files. Now that they are parked nicely on a Netgear ReadyNAS and independent of my computer, I can clean out duplicates and obsolete files to reduce the clutter and get things organized. One tool that helps with just that is called VisiPics and it can automate finding your duplicate photos, based on the images themselves, not just your file names.
With VisiPics, you choose the directory (or more) that you want to search and set the scan to run. You can configure it to be more or less strict on what it considers duplicates and pause/stop/resume the scan if need be. It supports jpeg, gif, png, bmp, pcx, tiff, tga, and raw image file formats.
You can also choose to show hidden folders or scan for duplicate images that are 90 degree rotations of each other. VisiPics uses ImageMagick’s libraries to process each image and can take advantage of multi-core processors to use your PC’s power to speed up the scan. It will save you having to open each photo to see what the picture is and then play a matching game to find its duplicate.
When the scan completes, you can move or delete marked files that the scan turns up. You can get full details within VisiPics or just use it as a reference if you prefer to do it manually through Explorer.
If you need to do some spring cleaning of your images, check out VisiPics. It’s free and it works great.
Now if only there was a tool that could do deduplicate similar videos, software, comics, and my other files.