Table of Contents       5. Find


5.8 Find Similar Photos

The Find abilities of NeoFinder have always been its very strong point.

But they actually do require that some metadata, like the file name, creations date, or others, are known to be found.

What if you have files with different names, and different dates, but containing the same or similar image? Somebody saved a copy of a photo with a different name, or in a different resolution? Or find photos of a certain color, or just images that contain similar items?

The
Find similar photos of NeoFinder is the solution for this.

You can find this in the File menu of NeoFinder.



If you select Find similar photos, NeoFinder will show you this new window with the settings needed:

top 10 colors are similar

First, you select which image you are looking for.

That can either be any photo of NeoFinder, but you can also
drag in a photo here from the Finder, or even drag in a picture from a web page!

Second, you tell NeoFinder what you comparison you want to use.

You can compare the
actual pixel motif, or similar colors, or even similar AutoTags (macOS 10.13 required for that)


For
Similar motif, the slider tells NeoFinder show similar the results should be. The further to the left you set this, the more exactly the same must these images be.


For
Similar color, you can select if NeoFinder should search for a primary color, or the Top 10 colors in the thumbnail. The comparison can be to find identical or just similar colors. That is a great way to discover photos of a similar mood or impression.

Find Similar colors




And last, the
Similar AutoTags give you the option to specify how many of the top AutoTags of a thumbnail should match

find similar AutoTags


Of course, you can select
which catalogs NeoFinder shall search. By default, these are all your catalogs in your NeoFinder LIBRARY, but maybe you need to search only specific catalogs.

When you hit the
Find button, NeoFinder will start searching:


As comparing pictures is a very time consuming process, this may take some time, even though the code in NeoFinder is very highly optimised, and uses all available CPUs and GPUs in your Macintosh, and of course the full number of cores in your Apple Silicon M1 ARM chip.

When all possible matches are processed, NeoFinder will show you the results.



As you can see, files with the same motive, but a different resolution, or in black/white, or really even just a similar picture were all found for you!