If you’re a photo lover, you must have captured your important life moments over a period of several years through photography. We understand how difficult it is to organize your ever-growing photo library. Thanks to the advancement of technology, with the right tools you can now do this job pretty easily with efficiently. Here are a few methods to find and delete duplicate JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF files.
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Method 1: Find Duplicate Images Using Freeware IrfanView
IrfanView itself is not a duplicate finder software. However, it includes a set of powerful features that could be a great help to quickly find out duplicates. With IrfanView, you can sort your images in alphabetical order and identify & fix redundancy.
1.Download IrfanView from the official website.
2. Double-click and follow the setup wizard instructions to install the program on your computer.
3. Open the IrfanView Thumbnails program through it’s Desktop or Start Menu shortcut.
4. The main program window is split into two parts. The left hand side part lists all the drives/ folders on your hard disk, along with widely used library folder contents (this includes, Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders). When you select a folder from this panel, the right hand side displays all the containing images as thumbnails. The name of each image can also be seen underneath that thumbnail.
5. Now, expand the Pictures folder on the left, and IrfanView Thumbnails will display you all the images that are stored inside the Pictures folder. If your images are stored in any other location, navigate to that partition/ folder from the left panel.
6. To identify duplicate copies, it is important to sort the images name-wise in alphabetical order. Just click the Options menu and select Sort Thumbnails | By Name.
7. IrfanView will now display all original images followed by their identical copies.
8. If you do not wish to see image thumbnails, head on to the View menu and select Details. The program will now display file names, file size, date of modification and file type in different columns.
The resultant screen will look like this:
9. The duplicates can be easily distinguished from the original images in different pairs. While Nature.jpg could be the original file, Nature – Copy (2).jpg, Nature – Copy (3).jpg, Nature – Copy (4).jpg could be it’s identical copies. (See the following figure)
10. To select multiple duplicates files, you may use different key combinations. Use Shift + Left Mouse Click to select files in sequence, or use Click + Left Mouse Click to select multiple files without sequence.
11. To delete your duplicates, select your files and then simply press the Delete key of your keyboard or head on to the File menu, and select Delete selected files.
Drawbacks
One common drawback while using IrfanView Thumbnails to identify duplicates is that you will need to browse through each folder and subfolder of your hard disk to list containing images and identify duplicates. In a real life scenario, duplicate photos are not located in a single folder. On the contrary, they are scattered across hundreds of thousands of different folders and not to forget, multiple partitions. While an original image might be stored in the Pictures folder, it’s duplicate copies could be stored somewhere in altogether different directories such as Downloads and My Documents. Therefore, this technique may not work if you have a very large photo collection with too many files scattered across different drives, folders and subfolders. It is only feasible if you have a very limited number of photo files.
Method 2: Finding Duplicate Images Using Windows Search
The second method is to use the extensive Search feature in Windows to list all files of a specific kind in en entire hard disk, or a specific partition/ folder. Unlike IrfanView, Windows will list all image files in a specified partition without having you to actually browse through each folder. You can find all duplicate image formats such as JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF using Windows Search as follows:
1.Double-click This PC icon on your Desktop.
2. Open the drive/ partition that contains your duplicate images. For example: drive D:\
3. In the Search box on the top right corner, type your desired image extension (for example, JPG). Press ENTER.
4. Wait for a while. Windows will start listing all the images matching your image type. This can take some time.
5. Once the image list is loaded, click on the View tab located on your Ribbon interface, and select Sort by | Name.
6. Click on the Sort by icon again, and select Ascending.
7. Your files will now be rearranged in alphabetical order. Duplicate copies may appear followed by the original images, just like in the case of IrfanView.
8. To view file details instead of thumbnails, click on View and select Details under Layout.
9. Use the key combinations (as discussed earlier) to select multiple files, and then delete duplicates (right-click > Delete).
Drawbacks
The search may produce a list of hundreds of thousands of files. It may take several hours or days to manually review the results. Moreover, the possibility of deleting the wrong files can not be ruled out. Accidentally deleting wrong files can cause terrible data loss.
Method 3: Quickly & Security Find Duplicate Images Using Clone Files Checker
Clone Files Checker is a features-rich tool that offers a quick and secure alternative to find and fix all sorts of duplicates, and not just only images. This tool is available for both Windows and Mac users and has its own advantages. It supports full customization so that you can include and exclude specific directories of your choice. You can add My Documents, Downloads, Pictures to search for duplicates, while choosing to ignore any unwanted directories/ subfolders of the added directories.
You can customize the scope of your scan by setting a file size range in terms of KB, MB or GB. The file size range feature can be utilized to set a lower or upper file size limit or a combination of these two simultaneously. Imagine you have tens of thousands of pictures and you only need to eliminate those large files that eat up your significant disk space. In such case, you can safely exclude files that are too small in size (for example, below 200 KB or below 1 MB).
Clone Files Checker also asks you to select file types to scan for. This could be a great help to avoid unwanted results and focus on files that truly matter. You can check or uncheck individual file type options such as documents, images, videos, music and archives (compressed files).
CFC has an in-house preview functionality to make it easier to view your image, music and video files without needing to open them externally.
CFC uses ultra-fast scan algorithms that guarantee 100% accuracy. You do not have to worry about deleting the wrong files anymore. CFC comes with plenty of automatic file selection criteria to help you bulk select files to delete or move them later.
Clone Files Checker offers Quick-Fix Wizard to fix all duplicates with just a few clicks. Just select a file version to keep (Newest/ Oldest) and choose your desired action (Move to Folder/ Delete Permanently).
In addition to local scan, CFC also support scanning for iTunes music tags as well as Cloud Scan. The Windows edition of CFC let’s you find duplicate files on your favourite online cloud platform with just a matter of a few clicks. Safely integrate your Google Drive, Dropbox of OneDrive account with CFC and perform a duplicate scan without having to download a single file. As the program uses Official APIs from the developers, there is no reason to worry about privacy. Your data is truly yours.
