Deleting Duplicates

[Artsey]

Large collections of pictures frequently have a lot of duplicates of varying qualities. In some of my folders I have found as many as 15 copies of the same image. In my Jayne Mansfield folder before deleting duplicates I had 10,000 images. After the delete I had 5000. When browsing a folder with a lot of duplicates you see the same image repetedly and some images you seldom see at all because you dont get that far into a large collection before you get done browsing.

When they are the same file size or similar name listing as thumbnails arranged by size or name places the similar sized or named images next to each other making them easy to spot. Deleting duplicates with varying sizes and names can be an almost impossibly time consuming task. These are some techniques to make the task faster and more reliable.

The first thing is to sort the collection into a broad easy to spot criteria like bikinis, one piece, costume etc. If you have more than one or two hundred images in some criteria you should divide it into more criterias because it takes too long to scan through much more than that to find the duplicates and you get fatigued and miss them. You might divide the bikini collection by those with water in the image or grass. You will probably put the bikini images back into the bikini folder after the deletion of duplicates but wait untill you have worked the whole folder. You should make up more criteria and if you invent some that work for you share it here. I found that some criteria don't work so good. You wouldn't use some thing like braclets because that is too hard to see in thumbnails. You might think that sorting by how the picture is framed, such as bust, medium or full length, might work. It doesn't because you may decide a "bust" image is a medium image some times when you see it and then you still have a duplicate. Or someone may have cropped an image to make it a bust while you have a better quality full version in medium frame. Also you wouldn't want to sort by color and black and white because you may have a great color image and don't want to keep a black and white version.

So here's the technique using bikinis.

Go through your base folder and move all bikini images into a temporary folder. I put all bra shots in too as it's too hard to see the differance between a bikini top and a bra in a thumbnail. Just clickity click right through the folder as quick as you can spot the bikini. If you still have over a couple of hundred bikini images in the temporary folder it's too many to start deleting. For Raquel Welch I had 1200. Move all the images with water in them to another folder I call that one "sort". This got me down to 500 to 600 bikini images with water and without. Still too many. I sorted into yet another folder I call delete. Here I put images that are very specific like a specific bikini or photo shoot or standing, reclining, sitting or kneeling. Now you may find that you have few enough images, less than 150, to begin to delete.

As you do this preliminary sorting the duplicates will become more and more visible. You want to resist deleting the duplicates with over 150 in the folder. They are visible in a quick scan but you still have to spot them individualy amongst a lot of other images that slows the technique down.

To delete;

I use ACDSee for all this. You may have to adjust your technique to fit your software.

Scan through the final delete folder and while holding the control key click on the duplicates you spot. Select the ones you have a lot of first to get them out of the way so later you can quickly spot the duplicates you have fewer of. Then view the selected files as a slideshow that you can advance image by image. Here you decide which ones you want to delete. I have found that I still keep some duplicates because I may have a good quality image with a water mark or that is cropped and a lower quality clean or full image. I'll also keep artisticly altered duplicates like colorized versions.

I'll mention here that you should check the file size because sometimes you may see two copies that look identical but one may be more jpeg compressed than the other or one may be a larger file size but still be intentical with no jpeg compression artifacts. in these cases simply zooming in with zoom lock and switching from one to the other may allow you to see which is the better image. Sometimes you might want to copy the images into an image editor to compare.

After deleting the duplicates move the images you want to keep into the final bikini folder. This gets them out the the way to find more duplicates. Then go back to the delete folder and look for more duplicates.

Don't do preliminary sorting into broad criterias all at once. Do one broad criteria, then sort that into a sub criteria, then a sub sub criteria, then delete and work your way back up the criteria chain to the base folder. For example sort into bikinis-water-standing-delete. Then do bikinis-water-sitting-delete. Then do bikinis-water-reclining-delete. After you delete all the duplicates of bikinis with water images sort for the bikinis-grass-standing-delete, bikinis-grass-sitting-delete.

Well thats all for now. If anyone thinks of additions, sorting criterias or some area where this essay could be improved or made clearer please post.

Some additional criterias I use;

costumes
street clothes
indoor
outdoor
single
group
color of clothes

Also when posting sub criteria mention the main criteria and or sub sub criteria formatted eg

swimsuit-water-standing

or

Main criteria-subcriteria-sub sub criteria