Clean up your photos library and clear out duplicates

If you take a lot of photos and store them on your Windows PC, you may have duplicate images that waste space on the disk and add to the clutter than builds up on drives. Find and delete duplicate photos.

Where do duplicate photos come from?

There are many ways to end up with duplicates and you might back up photos to another folder instead of backing up online or to an external drive. You might import photos from a camera twice. You could make a copy of some photos for editing (never edit originals) and then not get around to editing them all.

As you juggle computers and disk space, you may copy a folder twice, merge old disks with new disks, back up old computers that are being disposed of and so on. Duplicates are almost inevitable.

There are two utilities I use to track down and delete duplicates, CloneSpy and SimilarImages. Both of these have been around for years, but they still do the job and can clean up your photo collection.

Find exact duplicates with CloneSpy

I use CloneSpy to find exact duplicates. This free utility works with any file type and photos are fine. When the program opens, click Add Folder to select one or more folders to add to Pool 1 the list box in the top left corner.

In the next window, browse the disk on the left side and and click Add selected folder to add one or more folders. You may only need to add the Pictures folder, but if your photos are stored in multiple places on the disk or different disk, several folders can be added.

A folder includes all subfolders, so you only need add the top folder to scan all the subfolders it contains. Click OK after adding all the folders to scan.

Back in the main window, set Search for to Duplicates and set the Action. You can choose to delete the older or newer file, the one the the shorter or longer filename. It is up to you. Click Start scanning to set it going.

CloneSpy creates checksums for each file and when there are duplicate checksums it deletes all the duplicates. Only exact duplicates of files are deleted and you will never lose an original.

Find similar images

SimilarImages is a different kind of duplicate file finder and this free utility only works with photos. As the name implies, it finds similar images. It finds exact duplicates too, but it goes much further than this and it finds images that are not the same, but are very similar.

An example is an original photo and a photo you resized, perhaps for sharing on the web, emailing, posting on social media and so on. SimilarImages can tell if two photos are the same even if they are completely different sizes.

An original may be 3,000 x 2,000 pixels, but a resized one may be 600 x 400 pixels. SimilarImages can tell they are the same. This enables you to delete the smaller one if you no longer need it, leaving the original.

SimilarImages can also tell when two photos are almost the same. One thing you might do is take a burst of photos in order to pick the best one, or maybe to capture some action. I often take multiple photos of something in the hope of getting one good one.

The photos may be all slightly different, but SimilarImages can tell they are almost the same and you can choose the ones to keep.

Click the second icon in the toolbar to add one or more folders to scan. Subfolders are included and you can add folders from different drives if you need to. Click the first icon, the magnifying glass, to begin scanning.

When SimilarImages has finished, it opens a window to show the similar images it found. The buttons in the centre enable either the left or right photo to be deleted, one to be copied to the other, or both deleted. Deleted files are sent to the Recycle Bin, so you can rescue one if you accidentally delete the wrong image.

There is an option to delete photos automatically, but I prefer to manually check each one. This makes it slow and tedious, but I like to see what I am deleting.

In the screenshot above, the left image is a higher resolution than the right, so it is probably the original. Therefore the right image should be deleted. CloneSpy only deletes exact duplicates, so it can be left on automatic deletion, but with SimilarImages you need to visually check before deleting.

These tools are a great way to clean up your photo library and save disk space.