Finding duplicates

[pekisko]

Lightroom Version

Classic 12.1

Operating System

1. macOS 13 Ventura

Hi Victoria: I've just bought your book (Missing FAQ—excellent!). Your mention of Lightroom Duplicate Finder got my attention; I've scanned a few thousand slides from 40 years ago and wonder if that plugin would help me, since the scan files have no EXIF data—or do they? I don't want to purchase LDF until I know it will work for me. Thank you!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

What kind of extra information do you think it will provide for you? The duplicate plugins can only help you with data you already have, so if the scans only have basic information, they can’t help.

 

[pekisko]

Thanks for this. Basic to no info. File name and file size is all. The scans were done decades after the photos were taken.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Yeah I’m sorry to say scan information is pretty limited until you add that extra metadata, but once you have, it’ll be in the metadata panel. There’s no way round that.

 

[Califdan]

There are several products that can compare the actual content of the image (pixels) to ferret out probably duplicates. These tend to work outside of LrC but some can use the LrC catalog as a source for images to look at. This class of product create a low res, usually monocrhrome, version of the images and then compares those. some will detect rotated images and images with different cropping. In most you can tell it what criteria to use and in what order as well as how close they need to match in order to be flagged as potential duplicats. They each of course have different designs and some are better than others in certain areas.

For scanned images the file name, pixel count, files size, or any metadata is useless so for your purpose you would turn off those search criteria and just leave the Pixel compare. For a few thousand images they seem to work OK but for tens of thousands of images they tend to bog down to a crawl.

You may want to look at Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro as an example but there are many others.

 

[pekisko]

Thank you for your excellent advice, Califdan. I believe this will be the best (and probably only) solution to finding duplicates in scanned images.