Searching for photo/image/media file duplicates in folders and on disks
  1. Use the Verify File command and choose a folder or disk to scan and load the file listing to selected table fields.
  2. As the above command by default loads all file paths, for clarity you can filter out from the displayed listing any paths for file types that you don't need:

    1. Scroll to the path field, press Ctrl+Enter to enter filter for file extensions, for example, enter:
      jpg\z
      mp3\z
      mp4\z
      You can combine multiple extension patters by "or", for example:
      jpg\z|mp3\z|mp4\z

    2. Additionally, to permanently remove the unwanted file paths from the table,
      (a) use the Tools > Show Complement command to display the filtered out ones first, (b) click any column to select all these records (or enter something like 1:10000 in the record number field at the bottom) and press Ctrl+D to delete them. Double press ESC (the Tools > Show All) to go back to the found recordset.

  3. Choose which EXIF tags or multimedia tags you want to compare to find duplicates (or, in general some specific sets of files), like the GPS location where the photo was taken, author or artist, dates, camera type, track name or length, file size etc. There are about 60 EXIF tags and 70 multimedia sound/video tags, please see: Using fileStats() function.
    For each one you choose to check add a calculated text field with this formula and the tag code:

  4. The specified values will be automatically extracted/calculated. You can search/sort them any way. You can use various methods to find duplicates.
    The direct one is to use the Tools > Find Duplicates command.

    Alternatively, you can use the Tools > Find Unique command, then the Tools > Show Complement command and delete all displayed records which will result in leaving one occurrence of each path.

  5. You can perform various other searches, like for photos taken between some dates, sound files with specific bitrates, videos using specific encoding, songs or videos by a given artists and many more, see: Using fileStats() function.
  6. To delete the files you found use any method involving the del command in the command line. For example, insert "del" before each path (that is, simply define a field operation as '"del & " " & path' and complete this with one click) and save or copy this column (or two columns) to a *.bat file to execute in CMD.
    You can also use e.g. "copy" to move found files to a different location.
  7. In one scan you can create a list of 256 million file paths - at the moment this is the maximum number of records per table. If you need to compare files between multiple disks/folders, repeat this procedure and use one the table merging options (or, if you don't use binary fields in your tables, simple select the entire 2nd table, copy it to the clipboard, place the cursor below the 1st field of the last record in the 1st table and paste the data).