Table of Contents       5. Find


5.3 Find Duplicates

Sometimes, you really want to know if you have certain files in your database not just once, but multiple times.

NeoFinder can help you with that important task.

Introducing
Find Duplicates with NeoFinder!



Simply click the Find Duplicates button right in the NeoFinder toolbar.

NeoFinder will then ask you for the settings of the search.


First, you can chose which catalogs are being searched. Either all catalogs, or just those with a particular label, or a selection of catalogs. You already know this menu from the powerful Find Editor, of course!

Then you can specify what you consider as "same". The same
name, or the same FileCheck (MD5) value, or the same ISRC (for songs). NeoFinder 8.4 adds the ability to search for files with the same name, but ignore the file name suffixes, which would find files named "IMG_1234.NEF" to be considered identical to a file named "IMG_1234.JPG", for example.

Additionally, you can make sure that only files with the exact same size, creation date, or modification date are considered in the search.

You can also decide what
kind of files you want to find, maybe only photos or movies, but also just all files.

And last, you can limit the search to files of a certain
size. This might be helpful if the other searches turn up too many results.

Once you have set it all up, hit
Find and NeoFinder will start the search for you!

This is so incredibly fast that you won’t believe your eyes!


NeoFinder will then search your catalogs, and present the results for you:





Find Unique Files


Wouldn’t it be cool if NeoFinder could also just display all unique files? Yes, that would be nice, so now you can simply use the new checkbox for this:

find-unique-files

In that case, you get a simple list of all files that exist only once in the selected catalogs.



Find Duplicate Folders

NeoFinder can also search for duplicate folders! At this time, NeoFinder only uses the folder name, and the options you select for this comparison.

To get good results, it makes a lot of sense to at least use the "Creation date" option, and possibly also "Size" and "modification date", as that will give you folders that should have the exact same content, at least directly in them.

If you get a large number of results, please also use the "Only items larger than" option to remove all results smaller than the value to want to use.

duplicate folders

Save duplicate results

Is there a way to save the data collected by "Find Duplicates" for future reference?

While it is not really possible to store the entire hierarchy yet, you can create a new Album of the duplicate Items.

Here is how to do that:
1. Use the “Select all duplicates” command in the context menu after you have run the Find Duplicates

2. Then use the “Make Album of selected items” in the context menu again, and that will create a new Album with all the duplicate items