Foo - What's a good program to remove duplicate pictures?

The GF's daughter has taken a lot of pictures over the years, and hasn't deleted any of them from the hard drive of her laptop for fear of losing all of the copies of what she deleted. She's managed to create a number of duplicates while taking up too much space on the hard drive, and we want to remove the duplicates. There are a number of programs to offer to remove the duplicates, what's a good one to use for this? She's running the home version of Vista.

You can search some freeware sites for programs that will find duplicate files on your hard drive, then you choose the ones to delete. I have used a program called "duplicate file cleaner". I'll warn you that you might find a LOT of duplicate files, some of which maybe you shouldn't mess with, so proceed with caution.

You could do this on your own too. You can let Windows Explorer search for all photo files by searching for *.jpg , then take the list of files it finds and have it sorted by name, then you can look through the list yourself and delete anything that appears more than one time.

It would be best if you have a way to make a full backup before doing this process.

For an avid shutterbug, and external hard drive is also a good idea.

I've used Dupkiller (http://www.dupkiller.net/index_en.html) and it works very well.

Aperture or Lightwave is pretty good for indexing and cataloguing photos. Finds duplicates too.

You could do this on your own too. You can let Windows Explorer search for all photo files by searching for *.jpg , then take the list of files it finds and have it sorted by name, then you can look through the list yourself and delete anything that appears more than one time.I also find sorting by size is a good way to determine if two files are the same. A lot of times, they get put into different folders and renamed differently.

You can search some freeware sites for programs that will find duplicate files on your hard drive, then you choose the ones to delete. I have used a program called "duplicate file cleaner". I'll warn you that you might find a LOT of duplicate files, some of which maybe you shouldn't mess with, so proceed with caution.

You could do this on your own too. You can let Windows Explorer search for all photo files by searching for *.jpg , then take the list of files it finds and have it sorted by name, then you can look through the list yourself and delete anything that appears more than one time.

It would be best if you have a way to make a full backup before doing this process.

Thanks for the help. I'm going to back everything up to an external hard drive before deleting anything.

I also find sorting by size is a good way to determine if two files are the same. A lot of times, they get put into different folders and renamed differently.

Some of the programs that search for duplicates will find identical files even if they have different names, maybe if they have different dates, I just don't know about that part.