Dear GA,

over the last twenty years or so, I have collected vast amounts of
imagery (nature photographs, fantasy pictures, satellite imagery, you
name it) both by digital fotography, and by scourging BBSes and later
the Usenet. The current count is in excess of a million files. As you
would expect, there are certainly duplicates or near-duplicates in
this heap of imagery. This includes down-scaled or down-sampled
images, cropped versions, etc.

What free-ware or commercial program for Windows XP or Linux could you
recommend to help me detect and sort through those redundant images? I
have looked at a few products so far (ImageDupeless, ABC-View Manager,
Visual Similarity Image Finder, Similar Images Finder, ...) but have
not yet been happy with what I found. Basically, I want a program that
I can point at the disks holding my images, and then after a nights
work the program comes back, and lists (and visualizes) duplicate
candidates and lets me select those that I want deleted. It should be
able to detect similar files with different names / sizes / color
resolution, and some amount of distortion.

Please name a few possible applications, how I could get them, rank
them, and tell me as to why they would be most appropriate to solve my
problem.

Many thanks in advance,

    Philip Lynx

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Request for Question Clarification by rainbow-ga on 06 Sep 2005 08:50 PDT

Please take a look at this and let me know if it will suit your purposes:

http://yippee.i4free.co.nz/html/win/graphics/title11712.htm

Waiting to hear your views.

Best regards,
Rainbow

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Request for Question Clarification by bobbie7-ga on 06 Sep 2005 09:07 PDT

Hello Philip,

Here are 2 more options.

VISUAL SIMILARITY DUPLICATE IMAGE FINDER
http://www.mindgems.com/products/VS-Duplicate-Image-Finder/VSDIF-About.htm


OMEGATRON - ODIN Professional - Duplicate Image Finder
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/File_Cleanup_Utilities/ODIN_Professional___Duplicate_Image_Finder.html
/

Would the above programs meet your needs?

Thanks,
bobbie7

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Request for Question Clarification by rainbow-ga on 06 Sep 2005 09:16 PDT

Here's another:

Double Pics
http://www.doublepics.net/

Rainbow~

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Clarification of Question by philip_lynx-ga on 06 Sep 2005 09:23 PDT

Hi rainbow-ga and bobbie7-ga,

thank you for your suggestions. I was not yet aware of Dup Finder and
ODIN, I was aware of the other one (see list in question). Dup Finder
can not handle .gif files, which is an issue.

However...

Suggesting one or a dozen applications does _not_ answer my question.
Given the list price, I am even slightly disappointed by this
approach. Let me repeat my question:

Please name a few possible applications, how I could get them, rank
them, and tell me as to why they would be most appropriate to solve my
problem.

Note the 'rank' and 'why'. This means, you need to have a clue what
you are talking about.

Looking forward to a knowledgeable answer...

Philip

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Request for Question Clarification by bobbie7-ga on 06 Sep 2005 09:27 PDT

Dear Philip,

Since I have not tried these programs I will leave this question open
for other researchers.

Best regards,
Bobbie7

In regards to Dup Finder not being able to read .gif files, that is
not really an issue. In Adobe Photoshop, you can easily set up an
action to convert .gif files to any other extension of your choice. At
the click of a button, all of the .gif files will be resaved in a
different format.

I understand where you are coming from, however, I am very reluctant
to convert image formats (due to loss, and for historical reasons),
and we are talking a large amounts of files here. Plus, I do not own
Photoshop, gimp is much less expensive ;-) Still, thanks for your
comment...

Dear All
I bought this program and I am extremely happy with it. It supports
almost ALL available formats...even jpeg2k. You can see the list of
supported formats on the screenshot here:
http://www.mindgems.com/products/VS-Duplicate-Image-Finder/VSDIF-Screenshots.htm
and more info here:
http://www.mindgems.com/products/VS-Duplicate-Image-Finder/VSDIF-Features.htm

I am really happy with it and it finds more than 2 similar
images....for example it can detect 2,3,4 or more similar images which
I did not see in other similar programs.
Detection is extremely fast compared to others and also extremely
precise...I expect now the new version wich they claim will be even
faster.
Indeed I am ipressed try it for yourselves.

About question asked by "philip_lynx-ga" I don't know why he does not
like it...it does exactly what he wants...