Remember those old days when the film rolls were limited to only 24 shots? Nowadays, almost everyone has a smartphone with a high-pixel camera. If you’re someone who loves capturing every moment of your pet cat around your neighbourhood, and then transferring those photos to a bigger screen, this article is for you.
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As we transfer so many photos to our Windows 11 PC, there’s a need to organize and cull them down a bit to prevent a photo bloat. A simple photo transfer and sharing can cause a lot of duplication, if not done correctly. These duplicates eventually take up your storage and cause problems finding the ones you actually need. Over years, your photo library becomes bloated with duplicate junk and you’re forced to delete some of the precious photos that are close to your heart. Even though there is no in-house duplicate cleaner available in Windows 11, there are ways to manually tackle this issue. And if you haven’t guessed already, some third-party apps offer an incredible solution that saves both your time and effort. Let’s see how.
Sort photos by their names
File Explorer is a great tool that lets you browse through different drives, folders, sub-folders and manage the contents. With File Explorer, you can sort and group your photos alphabetically and identify duplicate photos that have suffixes like – Copy (2), – Copy (3), – Copy (4) at the end of the file names.
To sort photos by their names, click on the File Explorer icon on the taskbar and then click on Sort > Name.
Similarly, to group photos by their names, click on Sort > Group by > Name.
That’s it, it’s that simple.
Third-party duplicate photos finder
Manually finding duplicates is simple when there are fewer photos. But if you’ve got a photo collection with hundreds of thousands of files, things become pretty difficult and challenging.
Fortunately, some third-party solutions offer an incredible solution when it comes to managing and organizing your photos. PictureEcho, for example, lists out all duplicate photos on your Windows 11 and provides you with automated selection patterns to fix them.
PictureEcho lets you choose how you want to scan for duplicate photos. Primarily, there are two similarity modes:
- Exact Match: When selected, PictureEcho will find duplicate photos that are fully identical in nature. Use this option for 100% accuracy.
- Similar Match: When selected, PE will find photos that are visually-similar in nature. There are multiple similarity levels to choose from. For example, Level 1 finds photos that were taken within a timespan of 30 seconds, whereas Level 2 finds photos that were taken within 1 minute timespan. Level 4 does not take the time factor into consideration at all.
It’s up to you which similarity level to choose from, depending on your own needs and the nature of the photos stored on your device. However, we don’t recommend selecting level 4 as it requires carefully analyzing the photos by the user.
Steps
Now, let’s get back to the steps. PictureEcho has a simple UI with no cluttered options. Even if you’re a novice user, you can get started easily and quickly within a few minutes.
- Download and install PictureEcho.
- Click on Add Path.
- Select the folder or drive you want to scan for duplicates.
- Choose Exact Match or Similar Match and configure the similarity level, if required.
- Click on Start Search.
- Please be patient while the application searches through the scan folders and shows up the duplicate images.
- Once the scan is finished, PictureEcho will list all duplicate photos in the form of thumbnails. You can see the actual content of the image without needing to open it.
- Use the checkboxes on the left of each thumbnail to mark or unmark your images. Mark the images you want to delete, and unmark the ones you want to retain.
- Alternatively, you can use the automated file selection patterns available. For example: Click on Select Duplicates and choose whether to retain low or high-resolution images, bigger or smaller images, newest or oldest images, etc.
- Finally, click on Select Action and choose if you want to delete your photos or move them to a folder. Click on Yes to confirm.
Bonus Tip: Dedupe Lightroom Photos from Windows 11
PictureEcho is not just about simple images. If you’re using Adobe Lightroom to manage and edit your photos, you can search throughout its huge catalog for duplicate photos. You can declutter and optimize your Lightroom for Windows 11 catalog and speed up its speed and performance.
- Exit Lightroom, if it’s already open.
- In the main interface of PictureEcho, select Adobe Lightroom from the Scan Mode drop-down menu.
- PE will automatically detect and add your Lightroom catalog. The default location is: C:\Users\UserName\Pictures\Lightroom Catalog.lrcat.
- Choose your similarity mode and level and then click on Start Search.
- Mark and delete duplicates just like the earlier example.
