Easy When You Know How
Jane Hoskyn on removing duplicate files
The closest I’ve ever got to Twitter fame is when Countdown’s lexicographer Susie Dent ‘liked’ my phrase “dupe-spotting”. Sadly I couldn’t offer any fascinating etymological explanation for the phrase. It was merely a Twitter-sized description of an evening I’d spent spotting doubledup entries for an online quiz. Perhaps if I now fill a whole page of Computeractive with “dupe-spotting”, I’ll catch the attention of the lovely Ms Dent once more and my made-up phrase will end up in next year’s Oxford English Dictionary.
So it’s with an unusually high level of motivation that I turn to this fortnight’s tech task. My PC’S hard drive is stuffed to its eyeballs with duplicate files – notably photos. Years of enthusiastic snapping and scanning, online gallery-making, backing up, and ‘Save As’-ing have filled my computer with more photo files than there are seconds in the day. Many are exact copies, but with different filenames after being downloaded again from Facebook and the like.
These duplicates (or dupes, to me and my new friend Susie) cause a right old mess. Opening my Pictures library causes the same trepidation as opening that drawer in the kitchen. My disgust at the mess is soon eclipsed by the fear that my dupe-spotting skills are not acute enough to distinguish originals from duplicates. So I’ve left them well alone.
Why does that matter? I hear you ask. Well, if you value your photos (your personal history, in other words), the originals are priceless. Every duplicate thereafter is a degraded version of the original. It’s like copying a key. A secondgeneration copy of your front door key will fit fine, but a fourth-generation probably won’t. In the early days of digital photos I was far too gung-ho about ditching originals, and I’m now left with horrible copies that aren’t even good enough to print and appear to be covered in dayglo aphids. I also managed to delete many non-duplicates by accident.
Some would say you should avoid the risk completely by never bothering to remove duplicates. Storage space is cheap, after all. You can get a 2TB portable drive for less than £50 these days. That would comfortably accommodate my file mess.
But deleting duplicates is also about restoring order. I don’t just want to shove all my files in a 2TB cupboard and close the door (forever, inevitably). Instead, I want to weed the flowerbeds. I want to remove pointless and substandard doppelgangers so I can see all my photos, including those I’d forgotten I had.
So I set about my dupe-spotting with care. First I tried the free program System Ninja ( www.snipca.com/28147), whose new version (3.2.2) includes a Duplicate Finder tool. I clicked ‘Scan image files’ to find all photo dupes on my C drive, and off it went. For ages. After half an hour it found more than 50,000 duplicate photos - a figure I didn’t believe for a moment. No way was I going to delete all of them.
Then I tried the more specialised, but equally free, Alldup ( www.snipca. com/28146). It offered numerous content-compare methods and even the option to look inside ZIP files. I set it to scan my Pictures folder only, and it was extraordinarily quick. The results list let me check actual photos – not just a list of filenames – and remove one, some, or all at once (many of which were of my cat Iggy - see screenshot). Like all reputable duplicate-finders Alldup won’t delete anything on your behalf until you say so.
So, how much space did I free up? Not much. After weeding all my Library folders of dispensable photos I’d regained a mere 1.3GB – smaller than Microsoft Office. And if I’d not included videos, I’d only have freed up about 600MB. But space isn’t the point. My Pictures library is now almost a pleasure to browse – and will be, once I’ve rationalised my filenames. A task for another issue, perhaps.
After half an hour it found more than 50,000 duplicate photos, which I didn’t believe. No way was I going to delete them all