Slashdot Mirror


Does Anyone Make a Photo De-Duplicator For Linux? Something That Reads EXIF?

postbigbang writes "Imagine having thousands of images on disparate machines. many are dupes, even among the disparate machines. It's impossible to delete all the dupes manually and create a singular, accurate photo image base? Is there an app out there that can scan a file system, perhaps a target sub-folder system, and suck in the images-- WITHOUT creating duplicates? Perhaps by reading EXIF info or hashes? I have eleven file systems saved, and the task of eliminating dupes seems impossible."

23 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. fdupes -rd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've had the same problem as I stupidly try to make the world a better place by renaming or putting them in sub-directories.

    fdupes will do a bit-wise comparison. -r = recurse. -d = delete.

    fdupes would be the fastest way.

  2. Re:write it yourself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ExifTool is probably your best start:

    http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

  3. Write a quick script. by khasim · · Score: 4, Informative

    If they are identical then their hashes should be identical.

    So write a script that generates hashes for each of them and checks for duplicate hashes.

  4. fslint by innocent_white_lamb · · Score: 3, Informative

    fslint is a toolkit to find all redundant disk usage (duplicate files
    for e.g.). It includes a GUI as well as a command line interface.

    http://www.pixelbeat.org/fslin...

    --
    If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
  5. Geeqie by zakkie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Works excellently for this.

  6. findimagedupes in Debian by nemesisrocks · · Score: 5, Interesting

    whatever you decide on, it could probably be done in a hundred lines of perl

    Funny you mention perl.

    There's a tool written in perl called "findimagedupes" in Debian. Pretty awesome tool for large image collections, because it could identify duplicates even if they had been resized, or messed with a little (e.g. adding logos, etc). Point it at a directory, and it'll find all the dupes for you.

    1. Re:findimagedupes in Debian by msobkow · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why do I have this sneaking suspicion it runs in exponential time, varying as the size of the data set...

      From what this user is talking about (multiple drives full of images), they may well have reached the point where it is impossible to sort out the dupes without one hell of a heavy hitting cluster to do the comparisons and sorting.

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  7. Re:ZFS dedup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Have you read the zfs documentation? Setting zfs dedup does not remove duplicate files (per OP request, since there are eleven different file systems), but removes redundant storage for files which are duplicates. In other words, if you have the exact same picture in three different folders/subdirectories on the same file system, zfs will only allocate storage for one copy of the data, and point the three file entries to that one copy. Similar to how hard links work in ext2 and friends.

  8. Re:Seriously? by postbigbang · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah. Thanks. It's a simple question. So far, I've seen scripting suggestions, which might be useful. I'm a nerd, but not wanting to do much code because I'm really rusty at it. Instead, I'm amazed that no one runs into this problem and has built an app that does this. That's all I'm looking for: consolidation.

    --
    ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
  9. General case by xaxa · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the general case (any file), I've used this script:


    #!/bin/sh

    OUTF=rem-duplicates.sh;

    echo "#! /bin/sh" > $OUTF;

    find "$@" -type f -print0 |
        xargs -0 -n1 md5sum |
            sort --key=1,32 | uniq -w 32 -d --all-repeated=separate |
                sed -r 's/^[0-9a-f]*( )*//;s/([^a-zA-Z0-9./_-])/\\\1/g;s/(.+)/#rm \1/' >> $OUTF;

    chmod a+x $OUTF; ls -l $OUTF

    It should be straightforward to change "md5sum" to some other key -- e.g. EXIF Date + some other EXIF fields.

    (Also, isn't this really a question for superuser.com or similar?)

    1. Re:General case by Forever+Wondering · · Score: 3, Informative

      (Also, isn't this really a question for superuser.com or similar?)

      Possibly ;-)
      http://superuser.com/questions...

      --
      Like a good neighbor, fsck is there ...
    2. Re:General case by Yakasha · · Score: 3, Funny

      (Also, isn't this really a question for superuser.com or similar?)

      Possibly ;-) http://superuser.com/questions...

      So adapt the script to de-dupe stories?

      But then if we did that... what would we read on /.?

  10. Re:write it yourself by shipofgold · · Score: 4, Informative

    I second exiftool. Lots of options to rename files. If you rename files based on createtime and perhaps other fields like resolution you will end up with unique filenames and then you can filter the duplicates

    Here is a quick command which will rename every file in a directory according to createDate

      exiftool "-FileNameCreateDate" -d "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S.%%e" DIR

    If the files were all captured with the same device it is probably super easy since the exif info will be consistent. If the files are from lots of different sources...good luck.

  11. Re:Don't reinvent the wheel: fdupes, md5deep, gqvi by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah, this Ask Slashdot should really be about teaching people how to search for packages in aptitude or whatever your package manager is...
    Here are some others:

    findimagedupes
    Finds visually similar or duplicate images
    findimagedupes is a commandline utility which performs a rough "visual diff" to
    two images. This allows you to compare two images or a whole tree of images and
    determine if any are similar or identical. On common image types,
    findimagedupes seems to be around 98% accurate.
    Homepage: http://www.jhnc.org/findimaged...

    fslint :

    kleansweep :
    File cleaner for KDE
    KleanSweep allows you to reclaim disk space by finding unneeded files. It can
    search for files basing on several criterias; you can seek for:
    * empty files
    * empty directories
    * backup files
    * broken symbolic links
    * broken executables (executables with missing libraries)
    * dead menu entries (.desktop files pointing to non-existing executables)
    * duplicated files ...
    Homepage: http://linux.bydg.org/~yogin/

    komparator :
    directories comparator for KDE
    Komparator is an application that searches and synchronizes two directories. It
    discovers duplicate, newer or missing files and empty folders. It works on
    local and network or kioslave protocol folders.
    Homepage: http://komparator.sourceforge....

    backuppc : (just in case this was related to your intended use case for some reason)
    high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up PCs
    BackupPC is disk based and not tape based. This particularity allows features #
    not found in any other backup solution:
    * Clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk I/O. Identical files
        across multiple backups of the same or different PC are stored only once
        resulting in substantial savings in disk storage and disk writes. Also known
        as "data deduplication".

    I bet if you throw Picasa at your combined images directory, it might have some kind of "similar image" detection too, particularly since its sorts everything by exif timestamp.

    That said, I've never had to use any of this stuff, because my habit was to rename my camera image dumps to a timestamped directory (e.g. 20140123_DCIM ) to begin with, and upload it to its final resting place on my main file server immediately, so I know all other copies I encounter on other household machines are redundant.

  12. Quick shell script using exiftool by Khopesh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This will help find exact matches by exif data. It will not find near-matches unless they have the same exif data. If you want that, good luck. Geeqie has a find-similar command, but it's only so good (image search is hard!). Apparently there's also a findimagedupes tool available, see comments above (I wrote this before seeing that and had assumed apt-cache search had already been exhausted).

    I would write a script that runs exiftool on each file you want to test. Remove the items that refer to timestamp, file name, path, etc. make a md5.

    Something like this exif_hash.sh (sorry, slashdot eats whitespace so this is not indented):

    #!/bin/sh
    for image in "$@"; do
    echo "`exiftool |grep -ve 20..:..: -e 19..:..: -e File -e Directory |md5sum` $image"
    done

    And then run:

    find [list of paths] -typef -print0 |xargs -0 exif_hash.sh |sort > output

    If you have a really large list of images, do not run this through sort. Just pipe it into your output file and sort it later. It's possible that the sort utility can't deal with the size of the list (you can work around this by using grep '^[0-8]' output |sort >output-1 and grep -v '^[0-8]' output |sort >output-2, then cat output-1 output-2 > output.sorted or thereabouts; you may need more than two passes).

    There are other things you can do to display these, e.g. awk '{print $1}' output |uniq -c |sort -n to rank them by hash.

    On Debian, exiftool is part of the libimage-exiftool-perl package. If you know perl, you can write this with far more precision (I figured this would be an easier explanation for non-coders).

    --
    Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
  13. Re:Seriously? by zakkie · · Score: 5, Informative

    See my earlier contrivution: geeqie. It will even scan for image similarity not just rudimentary hashing. Someone else mentioned gqview & that it was out of date - geeqie is what gqview became.

  14. Re:You don't need software for this by unrtst · · Score: 3, Informative

    Adjust as needed:

    find ./ -type f -iname '*.jpg' -exec md5sum {} \; > image_md5.txt
    cat image_md5.txt | cut -d" " -f1 | sort | uniq -d | while read md5; do grep $md5 image_md5.txt; done

    ...though I think something more sophisticated than an md5sum would be wise (exif data could have been changed but nothing else, and you'd miss that dupe).

  15. Re:I think I wrote one of these. by Cummy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why do people on this site believe that everyone who is interested in tech is a programmer? This"just write it" is foolishness of the highest order. For many of us non-programers "just write it" is like telling some one living in Florida to "just build a plane and fly to that concert in Vienna after work tomorrow". If that seems like a ridiculous ask, then so is asking a person without the skill to write a script for that. So it can be done in 20 minutes, use that 20 minutes to help someone by writing the program and loading it to a repo. All the 20second tutorials in the world will not get someone to write a program if they just don;t have the skill set.
    This is part of the reason Windows is successful: think of a problem, there is likely program out there that solves it already, and if there isn't one someone will soon write one (Apple users just go and buy one). Linux will not get out of single digit adoption until people with the skills write and edit programs for the non-programers like myself because when stuff needs to get done fast Windows will have the program (and yes it is easier to clean out the malware and fight the popups than it is to write the program).

  16. Re:write it yourself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use VisiPics for Windows. It's a free software that actually analyses the content of images to find duplicates. This works very well because images may not have exif data or the same image may be different file sizes or formats.

    I don't know if it will work under Wine, but it's worth a try.

  17. I wrote one myself by tepples · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What I did in my deduplicator written in Python was group the files by their and reject any file with a unique size. Then I'd hash the first few kilobytes of each file with MD5 (it's just a spot check so speed is more valuable than security against intentional collisions) and reject any file with a unique first few kilobytes. Finally I'd hash the whole file with a more secure hash.

  18. Re:Hashes should be relatively easy by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 3, Informative

    md5 is a 128bit hash. Assuming your not trying to create collisions, the odds of you getting a collision in n files is:

    p = 1 - (2^128)! / ((2^128 - n)! * (2^128)^n)

    This is an expression that starts at 0 and gradually goes to 1 as n goes to infinity.

    These numbers are so big, I have no idea how to even solve for n to get something like p = 0.0001%, without using a bignumber package, but I imagine n would have to be *REALLY* big in order to get a p significantly above 0

  19. Re:write it yourself by niftymitch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ExifTool is probably your best start:

    http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

    find . -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort -flags | uniq -flags

    There are flags in uniq to let you see pairs of identical md5sums as a pair.

    Multiple machines drag the full file to the next machine and concat the
    local files....

    Yes exif helps. but some editors attach exif data from the original...
    The serious might cmp files as well before deleting.

    --
    Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
  20. Visipics is excellent. by micronicos · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use VisiPics for Windows. It's a free software that actually analyses the content of images to find duplicates. This works very well because images may not have exif data or the same image may be different file sizes or formats.
    I don't know if it will work under Wine, but it's worth a try.

    Visipics is the only tool I have ever found that will reliably use image matching to dedupe; it is Windows only but I have used it on my own collections & it works very well indeed: http://www.visipics.info/

    Now (v1.31) understands .raw as well as all other main image formats & can handle rotated images; brilliant little program!

    --
    Nico M, London, GB.