How To Easily Find Duplicate Images On Your Computer

Easily Find Duplicate Images

Do you have tons of images stashed away on your computer? How many are duplicate images or very similar to each other? Here’s a very simple way to find out, and relieve yourself and your computer of some of that clutter at the same time.

The Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder

I have roughly 90,000 images stored on my computer. Many of them are backups of Wallpaper on my website but by far most are for personal enjoyment. With that many pictures to manage it is nearly impossible to avoid lots of duplications. No need for that.

The Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is a free, portable utility that will quickly scan your folders for not only duplicates but similar images as well. It will compare images of different sizes and color gradients. It also recognizes the major image formats in use today. Did I mention that it was free?

Here’s a look at the main window:

Using this software is child’s play. You can type in the full path to any folder, or number of folders, into the upper panel. It’s much easier though if you just drag and drop them there. The added benefit is that you will avoid typos that way.

Once you have all the folders you want to compare listed, just click the Start Search button and let the program finish its scan. If you choose only one folder, then the images within that folder will  be compared. There will be a progress window that pops up letting you know how much time remains before it is finished. I regularly scan folders containing many thousands of images and it never takes more than a few minutes. It’s pretty fast.

When it is done, you will see a list in the bottom panel showing the paths to them and what percentage of similarity there is between them. This list is sortable by clicking on the buttons above the columns. By clicking on any row, the current images will change.

In the above example you can see an 86% similarity between the two images; it also shows the differences in image file sizes and dimensions.

This is what the Settings Options look like:

If you would like to take The Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder for a test spin you can get it at Duplicate Finder. You will find other free software at this site. One apparently searches for duplicate MP3 audio files and there is also a file recovery program there. I have not tried them. Yet…

Final Thoughts

This utility is quite flexible considering its small size (it is a small ~900K download). If you have a large collection of images then this or a similar program is a necessity. I have seen several duplicate image checkers floating around on the internet but they are either expensive or they simply don’t live up to the task.

This one’s a keeper!

—