little tool request - does it exist

Calina

Picasa aside, does anyone know of a programme that will sweep your hard drive looking for (and identifying) duplicate files? Me has a scary looking hard drive which really needs to be tidied up and I want to do a mass renaming of photographs to some sort of organised file naming convention which I won't do until the dupes are identified and swept out.

I don't like the way that Picase catalogues/organises your photographs which is why I don't want to use it, and I don't want to implement anything on ACDSee until I've done the naming and gotten rid of all the dupes and done some fundamental organising

Ruu_Old

CCleaner has a search tool for duplicate files, not sure if it is what you are looking for.

Calina

Actually Ruu, thanks a million but it looks as though ACDSee Pro will do it - I'll know in a little while I guess, when it's finished running through the drive

magicbastarder

a cheap and not very cheerful way of doing it is to search for files over a threshold size, and then sort by size. you have to spot the duplicates by eye, and will only work for exact duplicates.

Calina

Conservatively I have more than 25000 photographs on the drive concerned. They're in a mess because the computer I used to use had to be reimaged and stuff got transferred to a hard drive in a less than organised manner.

I'm trying to put some sort of digital asset management system in place. Today and yesterday I had to go through the archives to select 200 or so photographs. I need to organise this properly before it gets any scarier. Manually is not going to cut it because there are just far too many files. ACDSee has already allegedly found more than 2200 duplicate pairs.

Hand on heart, this is a mess, but I'd like to stop it being a mess into the future.

Altered_Images

Hi,

this is a great little tool for such a job....
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,25706-page,1-c,downloads/description.html

Best of all its free and it can search for all kinds of files on specific drives only.

Hope this helps

thebaz

i'm not keen on the picassa organising , but apart from that i find it great -- you get used to its irregularities -- like all things

SpicyNoodle

Wow this was an interesting topic to stumble upon, that is just what I need lol. Altered_Images, that one looks good!

Muineach

I use DoubleKiller, it's fast, free and is just one exe file, no install.
The thing I liked about it was that you can set it to look at the CRC of the file, so that if you have file A & file B (diff. file names)with the same CRC, they are the same file, you can set it up to move the duplicate files or bin them, again run it a few times on a test directory, just to be sure

Marcus

You might also try SpaceMonger. This is a FANTASTIC tools for hard drive cleanup and AFAIK will detect and allow you to delete dups very easily.

Highly recommended...

Calina

Hmmm. Marcus, I don't see Vista support there...do you know if it runs okay on Vista?

Marcus

Calina wrote:

Hmmm. Marcus, I don't see Vista support there...do you know if it runs okay on Vista?

I'm running it on XP x64... and its very stable. I would be surprised if it didn't run on Vista. From there FAQ

""What operating systems will SpaceMonger run on: Windows Vista: We have started testing on Windows Vista. SpaceMonger v2.1 and v2.1.1 run on Vista, but with a few minor bugs; when SpaceMonger v2.2 is released, it will run on Vista properly."

Borderfox

Just be careful because with the 20d and the 350d you get duplicate numbers every 10000 files when it resets back to zero...

Marcus

Borderfox wrote:

Just be careful because with the 20d and the 350d you get duplicate numbers every 10000 files when it resets back to zero...

Definitely one to watch out for, but seriously if any de-dupe utility doesn't also perform a CRC check, then its time to remove that util from your system permanently!