Capturing beautiful sceneries and important moments in our life is a lot easier than before, due to the availability of high-quality cameras in today’s smartphones. Some people tend to capture images in quick succession, which leads to the piling up of several/ many images of the same instance with minimal variation between the images.
Identifying such pictures manually is sure to take a tremendous amount of time, and sorting out the whole photo database into the good ones (to be retained) and the bad ones (to be removed) manually can mean a nightmare for all reasons.
This is yet another instance where sophisticated usage of Information Technology comes to the user’s rescue. However, this task can only be performed by a purpose-built software application that can easily identify visually similar as well as duplicate photos. This article utilizes PictureEcho for identifying and removing visually similar duplicate images in Google Drive with the maximum possible degree of accuracy.
Solution
This solution demonstrates how to get rid of visually similar photos from Google Drive with the help of PictureEcho. The user is required to be familiar with Google Backup and Sync desktop client.
- Download Backup and Sync and install it. This platform is used to sync all the changes with Google Drive servers.
- Login to your Google account through the application. This sets the sync process in motion and all the user data is synced from Google Drive to their computer.
- Locate the three vertical dotted button and click it to open its menu. Next, click on Preferences to access the Settings window.
Opening up Preferences - Locate and select the Google Drive section. Select the checkbox for Sync My Drive to this Computer. Also, select the radio box for Sync everything in My Drive.
- Download and install PictureEcho.
- Launch PictureEcho, and add C:\Users\%username%\Google Drive via the Add Path button to the list of locations(s) to be scanned for visually similar images.
Adding up the Google Drive folder to be scanned - Next, select the radio box for Similar Match. Selecting the checkbox for Show preview is a neat idea as it leads to the photo previews shown to the user in the results section to better equip them on taking an appropriate decision.
- Click the Start Search button to launch the scan to weed out visually similar images in Google Drive. The results are gathered quickly and appear in the user interface of PictureEcho fairly quickly.
Similar images detected! - Click the Select Duplicates button to choose between retaining the photos by the smallest, biggest, high resolution, low resolution, newest, oldest or by the location criteria (see the following screenshot).
- Finally, click the Select Action button and go for either permanently deleting the unwanted photos or moving them to a folder you can specify.
The final step - Once the action selected in step # 10 is performed, Backup & Sync briskly springs into action and syncs the changes to Google Drive and hence, your Google cloud account is put into good shape to reflect the changes you just opted for.
That’s it. This way you can easily and securely get rid of hundreds (and more) similar images on your Google Drive.
