I went on a trip to Singapore recently and took around 500 photographs. I am not very good behind a camera, so i just got trigger happy and clicked whatever i could. After coming back i transferred the photographs to my laptop and started organizing them. I had some photos in my cell phone, some in my camera, some in my wife’s cell phone and so on. I started putting them in folders and soon it got too messy. I had the same photographs copied in multiple folders. Sometimes while taking a photo, i shot the same scene twice. They were almost identical.
I was looking for a way to remove duplicate photos from all the folders and i stumbled upon vispics. Its a cool application that allows you to find photos that are duplicate. It does not compare the file name or file size or anything else so banal. It actually compares two photos pixel by pixel and tries to find out if they look like. Its really amazing.
This is how the tool looks
you select a folder, transfer it to the right and then click on the little green play button and off it goes. It may take a while, so you might want to continue doing you other work or you could just stare at the count of the files compared. Its pretty amazing how engaging that can be, especially if you have some really important work that you are trying to avoid.
Once it finishes, you are presented with thumbnails on the left that shows duplicated photos, mark the ones that you want to delete and hit delete or move.
Its a very nice tool and if you are disconcerted with the presence of duplicate photos or if you are ready to do anything to bring down the count of photos in your library then i suggest that you give it a shot