findimagedupes: Exactly what it says

I ran past duplicate file searches not long ago with fdupes; here’s one specifically aimed at duplicate images. …

The aptly-named findimagedupes. Hey, that’s what I would name it, if it was my program. 😉

This one has a little history to it, so I’m a little surprised that it took me this long to find it. It’s the story of my life, really. 🙄

As I understand it, findimagedupes scans md5sums and “fingerprints” to find images that are the same, or visually similar.

One thing in particular I liked about it was the option to spawn an image viewer program to check the lists it produced.

I should say that I used the term “visually similar” above, because if I read the results right, I’m getting false positives on some matches on my system.

I stacked the deck with three straightaway copied documents in that folder, but it worries me a little that some of the others listed were not … quite the same.

Try it and see if you’re getting the same results. Not that it would matter much if it was designed to look for similar images, only if it was picking out files that were completely unalike. 😯

fdupes: The perfect solution to a duplicate problem

So I ran into a little problem the other day, when I spliced together two folders of wallpaper and ended up with a bunch that were probably the same.

Rather than riffle through them one by one and delete the duplicates, I dug around a little on the Internet and found fdupes.

Simple enough, fdupes checks file sizes, MD5 sums and does byte-by-byte comparisons, and where it finds similarities, it spits out the name.

To add to the fun though, you can trigger an interactive mode, and fdupes will eradicate the ones that you decree.

Exactly what I needed to solve my problem: I get a short list of files that are most likely identical, I pick the one I don’t want, and fdupes takes care of the rest.

For every task, there is a perfect tool. 😈