The Photos App is a powerful photo viewer and organizer shipped with Windows 11. When you connect your digital camera, USB stick or any other external drive, the Photos App gives you the choice to automatically import them to your PC. If your OneDrive account is linked to your Windows 11 PC, your OneDrive photos are also automatically imported and shown in the Photos app. The automatic transfer of photos from different sources causes a lot of problems. For example: As there’s no built-in mechanism to identify duplication of photos, multiple versions of the same photos keep getting accumulated. Over time, your computer runs low on memory.
Product Spotlight: Use PictureEcho to find and delete Windows 11 duplicate & similar images. Get it NOW!
Method 1: Using File Explorer
There’s no in-house duplicate photos removal in Windows 11. However, you can manually look for duplicate photos using File Explorer. This method is recommended only if you’ve a few hundred files. If you’ve a larger photo collection, it’s not worth your time.
- Open the File Explorer.
- Click on the Pictures folder from the panel on the left.
- Click on the Sort icon on the toolbar.
- Select the Name option.
- Again, click on Sort and make sure that the Ascending option is preselected. If not, select it.
- Your photos will be sorted in ascending order. It is now easier to identify the duplicate versions from the originals.
Note: It is recommended to move duplicate copies to separate folders, rather than deleting theme straightaway. Deleting duplicates permanently can cause unexpected data loss as manual reviewing can cause a lot of confusion and mistakes.
Method 2: Automatically Find & Remove Duplicate Photos
The better way is to find the duplicates automatically using a duplicate photo finding tool made for this purpose.
- Download PictureEcho.
- Set the Scan Mode to System Scan.
- Click on Add path.
- Select the destination folder containing your photos.
- Select your desired Similarity Level. Choose Exact Match to find only exact-matching images. Choose Similar Match to find visually-similar images.
- You can also change the Similarity Threshold by moving the slider to left-right. The default Similarity Threshold is set to 80%.
- Click on Start Search.
- Once the scan is finished, check the files you want to delete/ move. There are two ways to do so- You can manually check or uncheck the files one by one. Or, you can use the Select Duplicates button and choose an automated file selection method. We recommend the latter.
- After selecting the images you want to delete/ move, click on Select Action and choose Permanent Delete or Move to Folder.
PictureEcho Features:
- Thumbnail previews: There’s no need to manually open duplicate images in the list one by one to review them. PictureEcho displays image previews to make the task simpler
- Customizability: PE settings can be configured based on your requirement. For example, you can choose a similarity level of your choice
- Exact Match and Similar Match: Exact Match helps you find duplicates that match byte-to-byte. Similar Match on the other hand, identifies visually-similar duplicates.
- Automatic selection patterns: Using PE, you can automatically mark or unmark files in a batch. For example: Newest/ oldest files in each group, High/ low resolution files in each group, Smallest/ Largest files in each group, Select by image location, etc.
- Delete duplicates permanently or move them to a folder
- Other scan modes available: Lightroom Classic Scan, Lightroom CC scan, organize photos into folders using Image Organizer, scan by image, cloud scan, clean empty folders, etc.
