Discussion on:

Five tools for getting rid of duplicate files

Thanks.....very useful.

I've been on the look-out for a duplicate image finder. Offhand, will this find images of different sizes? For example; the same image at two different resolutions?

Yes, Duplicate Image Finder does a fuzzy match on the appearance of the pictures. It will even find pictures in the same series if they are of *almost* the same thing (like if you have frames from a film).

J.Ja

I will be downloading that. OK, I've said it is useful, but maybe it is more my appreciation of pattern recognition than anything else.

Do these compare the actual content or just the name, date, etc? And do they find identical files with different names?

Some start with the name alone. Most do a byte sum or similar hash, then compare those, so things like date, name, etc. are not part of the equation (or are optionally part of the equation).

J.Ja

Thank's a mil, this is very useful.

Been using Auslogics Duplicate File Finder for years and I love it. I'll definitely give some of these a look too.

I'm currently working on de-duplicating our file server and found a great tool Directory Compare 2.3 by Glenn Alcott. Will give you a side by side comparison of two folders and offsets non-similar files so its a great visual queue to see what is in fact a duplicate.

I highly recommend this app having worked through over 85,000 duplicate files.

Can totally use a music file duplicate finder!

what do you recommend to sort out your music - especially - quality versus types etc...

Consider this superior filemanager (at: www.ztree.com). Has its history in the stellar XtreeGold from the past. One of its many functions is finding duplicate files, based on the criteria you select, across ALL disk drives.

Anthonym:

Try Similarity. Gives the information you are asking for.

Anything for dedupping video files and sippets of videos? Had a program to do that but it got lost when my PC crashed a few years ago.

Can I use the lnk facility to eliminate duplicates. I've never used lnk before, so any recommendations?

OK, Hows about junction points or hard links, or whatever they're called?

Nice list... But what about macosx ? Any tools ?

I was surprised you didn't include Check Identical Files in your list; it's been very useful to me inasmuch as it can find identical files of any type, regardless of file name or location (it can also limit comparisons to specific directories, as granular and exclusive - or inclusive - as you like). It's one of the best software acquisitions I've ever made.

I use Directory Report
It can do a quick search based on same name, size
Then you can manually binarily compare the results

One of the best, cleanest, free apps I have used, with byte-for-byte comparison.

I DOWNLOADES IT AND PAID FOR IT IT WORKS VERY WELL FOR ME, I ADD EVERY FOLDER TO CHECK DOR DUPILATE FILES I ALSO RUN IT ON AUTOMATIC AND IT DOES FINF WHAT DUBBLED OM NY COMPUTER
I LIKE IT

Hi all
There is also a Panaustik (en.panaustik.com). It is abble, not only to find exact duplicates, but also identify pictures showing the same subject (even with different view point or zoom factor). Y'll be surprise to see how much time you shot the same subject!
A must have!

Doublekiller looked good to me, but it looks to be last updated in 2007. And duplicate image finder was last updated in 2009. I'm reluctant to try apps that were released way before the operating system I am using. Hopefully some more recent products exist and can be swapped into this list. (The other three apps look to be actively supported.)