Find Similar & Duplicate Photos – Organize Images Easily

If you are like most of us then you definitely have a large photo collection. Taking digital photos is not limited to a fixed number of shots as it used to be with old cameras. That is why we take multiple photos of the same subject until we get it right. That provides more flexibility and lets you choose the best shot. The issue is that those unnecessary photos are left behind taking up valuable disk space. As most new devices take high-quality photos, those unused files are quite large. They occupy gigabytes of disk space and reduce the performance of your system.If you view your photos in a slideshow on a photo frame or TV it is annoying to see the same photo 10 or more times too. The best thing to do is to remove duplicate photos and keep an organized image library. Unfortunately, you have to view thousands of photos often scattered over different drives or folders in order to do that. That is something that will take a too long time to do manually. It is an annoying and long task to do manually. Read on if you want to solve the problem of duplicate photos quickly and easily.

The Problem Behind Finding Duplicate Photos

Probably you already think that you can download a free duplicate file finder and get the job done. Unfortunately, you will be unpleasantly surprised that even the best common paid duplicate finders can not get this job done. The reason for that is that those tools compare the file data. Some of them may be able to find similar binary files, but they will still not detect your duplicate images as they compare the binary data of the files – not the actual photo stored inside. Those tools can not find duplicate photos unless they are 100% identical and stored in the same image format. To find similar and duplicate photos you will need a dedicated duplicate photo finder tool. It will load the image files and analyze and compare the photo that is stored inside with the rest of your images.

Choosing the Right Duplicate Image Finder

There are many duplicate image finder tools on the Internet, but you should choose wisely as you definitely will not want to delete important files. Many of those tools look at file names, file sizes, GPS coordinates, EXIF tags, and other unreliable photo properties. A good tool should be able to load, analyze and compare the photo content and not rely on such file properties. Therefore, the more image formats a tool supports the more duplicate and similar photos it will be able to identify. What I am going to propose here is the top pick in the Best Duplicate Photo Finder list. You can try the rest of the tools in that list too, but I recommend you to test them on a temporary folder first.

Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder Features

What makes Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder stand out is the fact that it does exactly what I described – it “looks” at your photos and compares them as a real human would do. It supports a whopping 340 image formats. That guarantee that it will not miss a single duplicate. These include 40 popular image formats (including Photoshop/Lightroom PSD, TIFF, HEIC/HEIF, JPG, WebP…) and 300+ RAW camera photo formats(CRW; CR2; CR3; FFF; EIP; DCS; DRF; PTX; PXN; MDC; OBM; NEF; RAW; PEF; RAF; X3F; BAY; ORF; SRF; MRW; DCR; SR2; DNG; ERF; MEF; ARW…)VSDIF is the number one choice of most professional photographers. It is extremely flexible and provides so many features that you will not need any other tool to keep your photo library organized. It has five scan modes.

Duplicate Photo Finder Scan Modes

• “Visual Compare” is the one that analyzes photos and identifies similarities. It can even find a shot of the same subject in different scenes.
• “100% Identical Files” will find exact duplicates.
• “Fiel Size” mode is extremely fast and will list all photos of the same size.
• Use the “EXIF Date Time” mode to find photos shot in close time intervals. You can specify how many seconds maximum the shots should have in order to be grouped together.
• Use “Compare EXIF Tag” to find similar or duplicate EXIF tags. For example, you can use that mode to find all the photos taken with the same camera or lens.

There is also an “Image Search” feature that you can use to find similar photos in your photo library using one or more sample photos.

Find Similar & Duplicate Photos

Download and install Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder. The installation is very simple and straightforward, Just double-click the downloaded file and follow the prompts. The tool will start automatically after the installation is complete.

Remove Duplicate Photos in 5 Simple Steps

1. Add the folders that you want to scan in the folders list on the right by dragging them inside or by pressing the “Add Folder” button.
2. You can choose the scan method and similarity, but the default “Visual Compare” at 95% works best in most cases so you don’t need to change anything there.
3. Then, press the “Start Scan” and let the tool do its job. If you have a large image collection it may take some time as the tool has to load and analyze the images. The application is very fast. Basically, the slowest part of the scan process is loading the photos from your hard drive. Therefore, if you want a faster scan, you should store your photos on a fast SSD drive. The tool is tested on 3 million images. Undoubtedly, It can handle even the biggest photo enthusiast image libraries.
4. At this point the scan process is complete. As a result, the program lists all duplicate photos and groups them separately by similarity. You can find how similar the photos are in the similarity column. Firstly, review the results and tick the files that you want to remove. Correspondingly, untick the ones that you want to keep. Generally, the tool will automatically tick the photos with lower quality by default. “Smaller dimensions or smaller file sizes if dimensions are equal” is active in the list. Of course, there are other auto-check methods in the list that you can choose too.
5. Choose what to do with the duplicates – delete, move or copy and hit the “Perform” button. I recommend you to keep the default “Delete checked files to Recycle Bin”. This will let you review the deleted files in the Recycle Bin before wiping them permanently.

Removing Duplicate Files Conclusion

Finding and removing duplicate photos using VSDIF is as simple as that. If you follow the above steps you will have a duplicate-free and organized photo library. That will save you a lot of disk space. Certainly, your system will run faster too due to the reduced amount of repeating files. If you are looking to find exact duplicates you can check also the best duplicate file finder list. The tool at the top of the list can find similar documents or archives and also similar file names. It can find duplicate files of any type. Share this article with your relatives and friends – they will definitely thank you.