DigiKam is one of the most popular photo management tools out there today. Apart from regular users who want to manage photos, digiKam in particular also intrigues programmers and other technical experts since it is an open-source tool. Being an open-source tool, it is also completely free for users!
Delete duplicate and similar photos using Similarity Threshold Bar for scanning.
Features
If you are looking for a tool that can be used to import and organize digital pictures instantly, digiKam is your go-to tool. It has an easy-to-use interface that makes it convenient for users to either directly load pictures from their computer or connect their cameras and then load pictures. Once the photos are organized into different albums, these albums can easily be sorted chronologically, by custom collections, or even by folder layout.
DigiKam is known for its outstanding performance. Even with libraries containing 100,000+ images, digiKam handles everything well and never crashes or lags. It comes with an extremely efficient editing workflow using which users can edit JPEGs, process raw files, and even directly publish pictures to social media platforms such as Facebook or Flickr. Not just this but with digiKam, users can also view and edit the metadata of their pictures. It also has an intuitive tagging feature that allows users to sort their photos in a more organized manner. Apart from tags, users can also add brief comments with each photo if needed.
What makes digiKam stand out amongst its competitors is its Light Table functionality. Upon dragging a photo to the Light Table, digiKam’s intelligent algorithms automatically point out areas of the photo that might need a touch-up. Then, the user can use digiKam built-in Image Editor which has all the basic functionalities such as color correction, noise reduction, and red-eye correction.
Additionally, the tool also has a queue manager that could be used if you wish to perform batch operations on a bunch of images. They also have great documentation that can be quite helpful for beginners.
Dealing with Duplicates
While managing and editing photos, users often try out different features of digiKam. Although this helps users to find the ideal solution for themselves, it also often leads to an accumulation of several unnecessary duplicates. These junk duplicate files create a mess within your device. If you want to keep your file systems organized, you can use PictureEcho. PictureEcho is a smart tool that can automatically scan your storage space and hunt down all the unnecessary duplicates. It is a licensed tool that does everything on your computer, locally. Since no data is transferred onto the web or a cloud service, you can be assured that your privacy won’t be compromised at all.
The good thing about using PictureEcho is that its user interface is pretty easy to use. After installing the tool, you only need to follow three simple steps.
1. Load Files and Start the Scan
After loading the PictureEcho application, click on Add Path. Through the new window that opens, navigate to the folder where you would like to run a scan for duplicate photos. Now, load all the files into PictureEcho. You can also load multiple folders at the same time.
Additionally, you can also specify whether you want to look for similar images as well or just exact duplicates. It is also possible to include or exclude different file types. Currently, PictureEcho is compatible with various image file types including jpeg, png, tiff, bitmap, icon, and gif.
When you have made all the necessary settings, hit the yellow Start Search button. Within a short while, PictureEcho will show you a list of all duplicates found, grouped together.
2. Select the Duplicates
Next, you need to decide which of these found duplicates you wish to keep and which ones you wish to get rid of. Although PictureEcho allows users to manually select duplicates as well, it is easier to go for one of their automatic filtering options. Using their automatic filters, users can quickly:
- Retain the larger image from each group
- Retain the smaller image from each group
- Retain the low-resolution image from each group
- Retain the high-resolution image from each group
- Retain the oldest image from each group
- Retain the newest image from each group
- Select images by their locations
3. Select an Action
Once you have selected all the duplicates that you no longer require, you then have two options. You can either permanently delete them instantly or else, you can move to a different location for now and review them later. PictureEcho also has a “History” section, which users can use to check records for all previous scans made.
Thanks to PictureEcho, with just 3 simple steps, you can easily detect and get rid of thousands of duplicates in a very short span of time. Doesn’t that sound great?
