Duplicate Media Management

[savingsomemoney]

Folks,

I need advice on automating the detection of duplicate media.

Background:
I have photos from important life events of my immediate family. Examples include weddings, engagements, etc. I'm the end-user and not the photographer. The situation is, the photographer would first share a few videos of the ceremonies. I copied them. Then we suggest edits, he makes them and comes back with another copy. I copied them too. So now, I have 4-5 copies of similar media files, with the only **probable** difference being the texts that were added to the already created movie files the photographer sent me. There might be some other difference.
Now, these files have moved between two Macs, one PC and three HDDs and SSDs.

Inefficient Method:
Going through each of the video files - twice at a time and compare. This would take me 50-60 hours and I'll lose sanity.
Since the files have been moved so much, I'm not sure if the EXIF data or RAW data or File info is reliable. And since most edits were made by the photographer and only the text had changed, I'm not even sure if EXIF data is reliable.

Tools considered:
(1) Dupe Guru
(2) Duplicate Annihilator
(3) Gemini

Questions:
(1) Is there an efficient way to go over this?

(2) I have photos as well with the same issues as addressed above - How could we deal with these?

 

[coolajami]

Hi again
there is no really an absolutely perfect way to do duplicate checks for photos and it is twice more difficult to do the same for videos, especially if the EXIF data were altered.

Have a look at this workflow, you may find some interesting organizational ideas on this:

Ultimate Photo Management from all Your Devices - Daniel Vreeman

danielvreeman.com

I would personally use the Hazel application as a controlled way of checking for duplicates as it is very customizable. Dupe Guru is good and free and would do a very good job finding duplicates but it comes with very limited support tbh.

I would start checking duplicates by name, following by creation date/time, followed by size.

TBH I haven't done duplicate checks for a while so my advice may be a bit outdated; for me, it happens automatically through the workflow(incorporating rules to hazel that would stop me from copying the same file twice) plus if you have an organized workflow you would not need to do this.