Photo catalog software is a great utility for people, as it allows them to easily edit photos whenever and wherever they want, without going through any hassle. Such photo catalog software programs range from photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop and QuarkXPress to photo management software such as Microsoft Picture Manager and Photo Gallery for Windows.
Even though all of these programs offer huge benefits to the users, they also contain a few cons of their own. In this article, we are going to discuss one of the major issues associated with photo catalog software, i.e. the creation of duplicates.
How does Photo Catalog Software Create Duplicate Pictures?
Photo Catalog software doesn’t create duplicate pictures intentionally. Whenever you ask the program to edit a photo, you are provided with two options i.e. either to overwrite the same picture or save as a new one. The picture that you save as a new one will be marked in this way.
Original picture name: Picture.jpg
New picture name: Picture (1).jpg
The new picture is saved because the user has either enabled that in the settings or doesn’t allow the program to overwrite the original picture.
Now, when I click Edit Picture the program will automatically edit the photograph and keep a cache of the copy in its memory.
I have two options now. I can either click Save and overwrite the original picture or click Save As and save a new copy of the picture.
Most users select the latter option and they end up creating a duplicate picture of the image in the same folder.
That’s how photo catalog software create duplicates of the same picture. Did you see? The photo catalog software doesn’t do it automatically and in fact, the user is responsible for creating them.
The Solution
Stop going the Save As route.
Every professional photo catalog software will prompt you to know whether you want to save the changes to the original file or create a copy. Simply click the Save button to overwrite the file. This will simply prevent the software from creating an additional copy.
However, overwriting original copy is not always advisable, especially if you’re someone who is a graphics designer or a professional photographer. Create a separate backup of all the images in their raw format in this scenario.
When should you save duplicate pictures?
- If the picture is very important and you can’t afford to overwrite it
- If the picture is on a USB drive
- If the picture is already an edited version of the original copy
- If the picture is in hi-res, while your edit isn’t
How to use Photo Catalog Software Effectively?
Photo catalog software programs are best at managing your pictures. Simply open them and browse to the folder which contains all the photos. Now edit them one by one if you want to crop or change levels. If you want to rename them, you can go for the bulk edit option.
Duplicate Picture Cleaning Software
We have already cited the reason that leads to the creation of duplicate pictures on the hard drive. These pictures aren’t useful at all and they also take a lot of space, especially if they are in bulk quantities. So the best option for a user is to clean up the duplicate pictures using a software.
One such software that performs this cleanup job with remarkable accuracy while keeping it simple enough is PictureEcho by Sorcim.
Simply download and install the software. Now add up the folder(s) from the Add Path button where duplicate photos exist. You can also start a full scan of the entire hard drive, but this process will take a lot of time to execute.
PictureEcho will bring up all the duplicate photos and provide you with options to either delete them permanently or move them to a different location.
