# Find duplicate images



## erding (Apr 26, 2012)

Am using LR 4 on a Mac. How can I find if there are duplicate images in the catalogue?


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## clee01l (Apr 26, 2012)

There is this nifty plug-in called *Duplicate Finder for Adobe® Lightroom
*It will do the job that you need .  You can use it on a trial basis for free and it will finde a few duplicates. But you really need to buy a license to get full benefit.


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## erding (Apr 28, 2012)

Many thanks, will try that.


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## Brad Snyder (Nov 2, 2012)

brantes, not an auspicious start here, with your first post being marginal spam. 
We'll leave it for now, but......


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## erding (Nov 2, 2012)

Thanks, but as I mentioned in the opening post I am a mac user and this application is for pc's.


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 2, 2012)

Brad Snyder said:


> brantes, not an auspicious start here, with your first post being marginal spam.
> We'll leave it for now, but......



Spam post deleted.  The same user has been posting the same all over the web today.


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## AlisonTB (Nov 7, 2012)

does it find duplicate images or just duplicate file names?


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## clee01l (Nov 8, 2012)

AlisonTB said:


> does it find duplicate images or just duplicate file names?


If you are referring to the Plugin, It will find duplicates based upon several criteria (file name, file size, create timestamp, derivatives and probably other factors too technical for me to understand that well.)  It is not 100% perfect, but if it errs, it probably finds more possibilities than are valid.  Nothing gets deleted by the plugin, but the user is presented with a collections of the results and can make the final decision on images in the collection.

 I've used it to consolidate catalogs and de-crapify totally messed up illogical user storage including images obfuscated inside iPhoto.


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## NJHeart2Heart (Nov 9, 2012)

clee01l said:


> I've used it to consolidate catalogs and de-crapify totally messed up illogical user storage including images obfuscated inside iPhoto.



Interesting! I've never bothered with that kind of tool previously because I could never tell what criteria it used. Sounds like I tool I could use, given it does test using various criteria - after all part of the crapifying problem is the use of multiple names, formats, etc....


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## clee01l (Nov 9, 2012)

NJHeart2Heart said:


> Interesting! I've never bothered with that kind of tool previously because I could never tell what criteria it used. Sounds like I tool I could use, given it does test using various criteria - after all part of the crapifying problem is the use of multiple names, formats, etc....


Unfortunately, the de-crapifying part is a manual process.  I began by designating one catalog as the master catalog and then imported every other catalog that I found into this 'master' catalog.  This included the back-up catalogs since the user had sometimes opened these and used them in place of the original.  Once I had all of the images in one master catalog. I ran the Duplicate Finder.   I proceded to work the obvious duplicates but still had many scattered all over the HDs  Next I used LRs Folder panel to create a date named folder structure and consolidated all image by date (unless a duplicate file name existed).  Lastly, I ran Duplicate Finder again.  I deleted any images not in my created data named folder structure. And visually inspected duplicates with the different file name but in the same date named folder to make a judgment call on which image would be declared the original.


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## fuxs (Feb 7, 2013)

There is a free and faster alternative to the mentioned plug-in. It is called Teekesselchen and it is open source. You can find it here.


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