Software to Identify Photo Duplicates

[gwilliams99]

Hello,
I am currently a Windows user who plans to swap back to the Mac when Leopard releases.

My question is I need a program for the PC or the Mac that can help me clean up the mess that I have with around 5000 or so photos. I know many are duplicates with different file names. Also I want the program to gather all the photos that are scattered across multiple folders/hard drives and put them into one directory.

Is there any program that can do this? I've tried a lot of programs and they seem to fail in one way or another. I have never found anything that can consolidate the photos into one logical directory.

I'm hoping/praying that there is something for the Mac that can do this.

Thanks in advance

Greg Williams

 

[Buschmaster]

iPhoto manages things in a pretty logical way... I've never had a problem with letting iPhoto manage the pictures destinations itself. As far as getting rid of duplicates, you could just (in iPhoto) sort your pictures by taken on date and then give them a fairly big preview in iPhoto and scroll through and delete the ones you don't want.

 

[gwilliams99]

Thanks for your reply.
Can iPhoto round all the photos up and put them into one directory?

Thanks
Greg

 

[Buschmaster]

Hopefully this screen shot will help you understand the folder structure that iPhoto uses.

As you can see they are all in the iPhoto Library folder. They are then organized by if they were edited or not, which gets sorted by year, and then film roll (batch you imported as)

Make sense?

 

[gwilliams99]

Thank you,
I understand now.
I'm looking forward to a new Mac running Leopard.

I do wish however the .Mac service was less expensive and offered more storage capacity for my photo archive. I have at least 5 GB of photos and I don't think the .mac service offers enough storage capacity for my current and future needs.

I'm currently using SmugMug for remote storage, however its a real pain to use. I'm really disappointed with it because it is very difficult to sort your photos into different albums once they are online. The difficult is the fact if you want a photos to be in more than one album the photo has to be physically copied it the new album. This is very time consuming. I really would not recommend SmugMug for this reason.

Do you have a favorite online album archive solution? cost is really not the major concern, I'm already paying $40 per year for a service thats a pain to use. I just want to make sure my photos are safe and easy to arrange into online albums.

I think the .Mac online storage would be awsome if it only allowed ample storage.

Thanks
Greg

 

[sblasl]

Welcome back to the Mac !!

I agree that using iPhoto is the way to go.

I saw this on MacUpdate today, might also be beneficial to you as well.

dupeGuru Picture Edition 1.2
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22724

 

[gwilliams99]

Welcome back to the Mac !!

I agree that using iPhoto is the way to go.

I saw this on MacUpdate today, might also be beneficial to you as well.

dupeGuru Picture Edition 1.2
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22724

This really looks like what I need. And there is a windows version as well, so I can get a head start of cleaning up my archive before the new Mac arrives.

I will post my experience with the dupeguru after I have used it.

Many thanks

Greg

 

[ChrisA]

Thanks for your reply.
Can iPhoto round all the photos up and put them into one directory?

Thanks
Greg

Yes, sort of. You can point iPhoto at a directory and it will go through it and all it's sub-directories and pull the photos into the iPhoto library

As for finding duplicates. One way is to sort the photos by some attribute. File size is a good one. Photos that are truely identical have the same number of bytes in them and will be sorted next to each other.