Library Management

[Vandey]

What's a good tool to manage my photo library? I'm talking scanning my PC to find photos that are duplicates. Over the years I've backed up photos from my wife's PC to my PC, since then I've bought a NAS and use that to backup my photos locally and to the cloud, but there's likely a lot of duplicates that exist on both of our systems that I've never cleaned up. I'm hoping to find some piece of software to run in windows to search through all my photos and find duplicates and allow me to manage them and clean up my photo library.

[never_here]

I used Duplicate Cleaner, on windows.  its a little old and haven't used it in a while, but i did use it to clean up thousands and thousands of photos as i was in similar situation. 

 

in my case, i often backed up my parents photos, and instead of going through them, i just copied the whole library and went from there.  I basically have about 800GB of photos and was like, OKAY, time to clean this up.  

I would recommend you do your best to sort through large libraries to old vs new.  The issue i had at first was, doing it all at once was not ideal.  Without careful settings, you could accidentally mess things up.  Its best to go folder by folder, or year by year.  From my experience, it did a good job of matching files based on meta data rather than file name.  Then i went through viewing them manually and then batch delete.  I dont know what IS the best way, but i pretty much deleted THOUSANDS of thousands manually.  Manually meaning, visibly confirmed the 5 photos if found that were duplicates were indeed duplicates, and i kept 1.  Also, it took like a few seconds to do the sscanning despite i was running a dual core old PC with plex, backblaze, cloud syncs, and other crap too, as it was my home server.  this was on windows fyi.