{"id":9,"date":"2014-09-06T16:54:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-06T16:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.appledomination.co.za\/index.php\/2014\/09\/06\/review-photosweeper-get-rid-of-those\/"},"modified":"2015-08-10T16:33:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-10T16:33:00","slug":"review-photosweeper-get-rid-of-those","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appledomination.co.za\/index.php\/2014\/09\/06\/review-photosweeper-get-rid-of-those\/","title":{"rendered":"[Review] PhotoSweeper – Get rid of those pesky duplicate photos"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/a>15 years ago, you rarely took a 2nd photo of something, since it cost you money to develop them afterwards, and a pretty penny at that.<\/p>\n

But now…a slightly different problems exist.<\/p>\n

We are all too happy to just start snapping and keep at at, without fear of creating doubles, triples or even more.<\/p>\n

While this is not a problem with development costs, it is starting to cost us hard drive space.<\/p>\n

Having a 100GB photo library now is nothing special anymore. We don’t even raise an eyebrow at 100GB.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/div>\n

So how do we find any and all duplicates?
\nAnd even worse, what about photos that are not duplicates, but are 99.98% exactly the same as the handful photos before it?<\/p>\n

Enter PhotoSweeper<\/a>!<\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/div>\n

\nPhotoSweeper does just what you think it would; it looks for duplicate photos, and removes them.<\/p>\n

But PhotoSweeper has a twist to it.<\/p>\n

It uses multiple algorithms, to find duplicates in different ways.<\/p>\n

It can do the simplest search, and find photos that 100% identical.<\/p>\n

But what about that photos that are just under the 100% mark in similarity?
\nPhotoSweeper can help!<\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/div>\n

\nOnce you have loaded your picture libraries from iPhoto, Aperture or Adobe Lightroom, you will be able to choose how<\/i> you want to compare your photographs to each other.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/div>\n

\nYour choices are:
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Duplicates Only<\/li>\n
  2. Bitmap<\/li>\n
  3. Histogram<\/li>\n
  4. Time Interval<\/li>\n
  5. Time + Bitmap<\/li>\n
  6. Time + Histogram<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nSo the Duplicates-Only is the obvious one mentioned above.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nThe not so obvious ones are Histograms, Bitmaps and Time-Intervals.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nThe histogram of a photo can be used to find other photos with the exact same, or extremely similar histograms and find duplicates.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \n“What is the histogram?” I hear someone in the back ask?<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nWell, the histogram of a photo is a visual representation, like a chart, of the colour shades, tones and brightness levels found in the photo.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nThe far left of the chart indicates pure black, and pure white is found on the far right of the histogram.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nNow that you know how bright each colour is in your picture, the height of each wave in the histogram will show you how many pixels will be found in the picture of each colour. Remember, it’s all made up Red, Green and Blue (RGB)<\/div>\n
    \n<\/a><\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nIf the histogram is not what you are looking for, then perhaps the bitmap option will excite you.<\/div>\n
    \nIf you have ever created reduced file-size versions of existing files, this is the option you are looking for.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nSet Bitmap to the desired size of the reduced image you are looking for, from 16×16 pixels to 128×128 pixels, and let PhotoSweeper do its thing.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nIf you are more like me, you’ll probably have 25 photos of the exact shame shot, separated by a second or so from each other. Really unnecessary and a big waste of space.<\/div>\n
    \nSo pick the Time Interval option, set the interval from 0 Seconds to 24 Hours, and feel the power of PhotoSweeper comparing your photos for you.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nIf you are feeling particularly frisky, you could always combine the Time Interval option with the Histogram or even with the Bitmap algorithm. <\/div>\n
    \n<\/a><\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nSo apart from comparing your photos and finding the duplicates, PhotoSweeper will automatically mark the newly identified duplicates, and if you choose to, will delete the duplicates too.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nIf you find a group of duplicates, or extremely similar pics, and you would like to remove them out of this particular library, but you don’t really want to delete them, why not copy or move them to another folder\/drive? PhotoSweeper has you covered for this functionality. <\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nAnd a little bonus?<\/div>\n
    \nIf you move or copy photos to a folder, you’ll be able to do a batch name change too. Awesome!<\/div>\n
    \n<\/a><\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nOnce you’ve loaded a photo library, you will be able to Quick Look any photo you’d like to, using the native OS X Quick Look functionality, just as an extra feature.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/a><\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nSo overall, I am extremely impressed by not only the functionality of the app, but also by the accuracy of the algorithms to find the duplicates, using your different choices of course.<\/div>\n
    \n<\/a><\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \nCheck out a quick demo of PhotoSweeper in action:<\/div>\n
    \n<\/div>\n
    \n