Organise your photos – part 2
Now you’ve got all your photos in one place, it’s time for a spring clean. Will Stapley reveals how to weed out duplicates, edit inaccurate timestamps and more
Remove duplicates in your collection , edit timestamps and set images to the correct angle
Find and delete duplicates
After moving your photo library to a single location (see part one, Issue 572) you’ll probably have some duplicates - especially if you gathered photos from several different sources (memory cards, old hard drives, USB sticks and so on). While a handful of duplicates won’t cause too many problems, having lots of them can make browsing your collection difficult and will also take up unnecessary storage space. The good news is that there are plenty of tools to help you find, then delete duplicates (even if they have different filenames).
One such tool is Searchmyfiles from Nirsoft ( www.snipca.com/33930 - scroll to the bottom of the page for the download links). In the Search Mode box at the top, select Duplicates Search (see screenshot below), then click Browse in the Base Folders section to choose the folder your photos are in. Don’t worry about the other settings – just click Start Search and you’ll see all duplicates listed in the search window. You can delete ones you don’t want by selecting them in this list, then pressing the Delete key.
However, Searchmyfiles doesn’t show previews of your photos – you only see the filename and where they’re stored. It also only finds exact duplicates (copies that haven’t been edited, apart from their filenames).
If you want more control, try dupeguru ( www.snipca.com/33931). It’s not as fast as Searchmyfiles and is a little more complicated, but it provides some clever additional tools. The best tool is for finding similar pics, which we’ll come to in a moment. First, though, here’s how to find simple duplicates in a program.
In the Application Mode section, select Pictures. Next, click the More Options button and drag the slider at the top to the far right until it displays 100 - this means dupeguru will only look for exact duplicates. Click OK, then click the ‘+’ button (bottom left) and choose the folder containing your photos.
A results window will now appear. The files highlighted in blue are what dupeguru considers to be originals, below which duplicates are displayed. To see previews of each, click the Details button (see screenshot below). In the window that appears, the image on the right is the original; the one on the left is what dupeguru deems a duplicate. Using your keyboard’s arrow keys, move down the duplicates list, keeping an eye on the previews and making sure each one is indeed a duplicate (if the previews are too small to see properly, drag the corners of the Details window to make it bigger).
Once you’ve checked them all and are confident they are duplicates, press Ctrl+a to select them all, unticking any you want to keep. Next, under Actions, select ‘Move Marked to…’ to move the duplicates to a new folder to deal with later, or ‘Send Marked to Recycle Bin…’ to delete them.
Now we’ll explain how to find similar photos – for example, a sequence of slightly different shots of the same sunset. To try this, click More Options again, then drag the slider to the left – the further to the left you drag it, the more potential duplicates you’ll see. You can
also tell dupeguru to look for differentsized versions of the same photo (useful when you want to delete smaller versions that you created for emailing).
To do this, tick the ‘Match pictures of different dimensions’ option (see screenshot above). Click OK, then run the search as before. Bear in mind dupeguru will search subfolders, and scanning your entire library for similar photos can take some time (it took us 10 minutes to scan just under 8,000 photos).
Fix timestamp errors
Every photo you take contains what’s known as EXIF data. This includes the photo’s timestamp, along with details such as the make and model of the camera. When you take photos using your phone, this timestamp will almost always be accurate because it’s taken from your phone’s built-in clock, which syncs with online clocks. However, photos taken on a digital camera can be guilty of more erratic timekeeping. If you haven’t set your camera’s clock, all your photos will have incorrect timestamps.
To fix incorrect timestamps, we recommend Bulkfilechanger ( www. snipca.com/33932 - another excellent free tool from Nirsoft). First, click File, Add Files, then navigate to your photo collection, select the relevant photos, then click OK. Next, highlight all the photos (press Ctrl+a), click Actions, then ‘Change Time/attributes’.
For our example, we’re going to change the date for both the Created and Modified timestamps, but leave the time unchanged. To do this, tick Created, adjust the date next to it to what you want, then repeat for the Modified section (see screenshot above). To apply the changes, click Do It at the bottom.
Rotate photos
When you’re showing off your latest holiday snaps, your friends won’t thank you if they have to keep craning their necks to view the occasional photo on its side. Avoid this by ensuring your photo collection is correctly oriented beforehand.
You don’t need any specialist tools for this – simply open File Explorer (press Windows key+e), then navigate to the folder containing your photos. Open the View menu and select ‘Large icons’ or ‘Extra large icons’, so you can see your photos properly. Hold down the Ctrl key, then click each photo that requires the same adjustment. Right-click one of these images, then select either ‘Rotate right’ or ‘Rotate left’ (see screenshot above) and all selected photos will undergo the same adjustment. For photos that are upside down, simply select either option twice to perform a 180-degree flip.