Finding and Deleting Duplicate Photos from your PC

Although I recently put a Solid state disk into my PC I've still been relying on a good old-fashioned mechanical disk to store my more precious data. Four 500GB Sata drives in Raid 10 holds everything from documents and letters to the family photo albums. Before I was content to have my photos on a raided drive with the infrequent backup to my server and an even more infrequent removable HDD dropped off at my dads house. With my son Nathan now just turned one I've developed  a new sense of fear for losing this data. Although the little man hasn't been around very long there has been thousands of photos taken of him and a surprisingly large volume of video clips.

Ideally what I would like to do is get all this data stored somewhere both secure, and reliable. But when I checked the size of the folder it came in at a whopping 107GB. Considering cloud based solutions such as Skydrive where you get 25GB free it was clear that this was never going to work.

The surprise of the sheer size of that folder got my interest in finding out what exactly was inside it! I began creating a new folder and started to organise photos into something more meaningful, but it wasn't long before I noticed a number of duplicates of the same photo.

It would appear that the problem is I'm too strict about keeping all photos - I want to keep *everything*. When synching up devices such as a camera phones, or cameras instead of overwriting existing images I allowed a new copy to be created. Add this up over the years with various photos been given to my from my family and then me backing them up again has created a folder with multiple nested folders with thousands of duplicates.

I decided that enough was enough and it was time to get rid of some of this - but how to start? It was clear that such a job couldn't be done manually. I turned my friend Mr Google to find my some software to do the job. I found programs like "Dup Detector" and "Doublekiller" after downloading and seeing annoying amateurish nagware and quickly finding out how garbage these programs were I eventually found my savior in a program called Visipics.

The reasons why Visipics is awesome are threefold.

1. It's Free
2. It's Awesome
3. Did I mention it was free?

But the main reason to use Visipics is simply because it works and it's very easy to use. Just point the program at a directory and it will go through your photos and automatically find duplicates from the actual content of the image rather than just the file info as some other programs were using. You can adjust a simple slider to find images that are identical, nearly identical or slight variations of the same photos. Then it's a simple case of marking the photos you want to delete and pressing a big shiny "delete button".  After using Visipics I managed to get the size of my photos folder down to 28GB - in some cases I had twelve copies of the same photo. That's quite a saving.

OK, this won't impress everyone - but it did impress me!