COMPARER TOOLS HELP FIND DUPLICATES

The cost of storage these days has become extremely affordable. With terabyte hard drives selling for less than $200 and 2 terabyte drives available for just a little bit more, you really don't have to worry so much about running out of storage space like we used to with our puny megabyte models. I remember learning about the first gigabyte drive and how amazing it was. A thousand megabytes on one hard disk drive? It was truly awesome. History repeats itself with the terabyte drive. A thousand gigabytes on one hard disk drive? It was truly awesome. And so it continues with a 1.5 and 2 terabyte model already being sold.

With each generation, I also remember thinking that owning such a large capacity drive would be all the storage I'd ever need. But as operating systems and applications got larger, the need for more storage grew correspondingly. So what takes up the most room on a typical user's hard drive these days? Usually it's digital photographs, music and videos. To combat the enormous sizes and the storage space these data files can gobble up, we use various types of compression. For example, raw music files can be paired down to manageable sizes using mp3. And digital image sizes are reduced using the JPEG compression algorithm. But there's one other culprit that can insidiously rob us of precious storage space and until recently there was no easy way to combat it. I'm talking about duplicates.

Duplicate files are easily detected if their names happen to be the same or if the files contain some kind of embedded descriptive tag. The trouble begins when you have files of the same thing that are named differently and have dissimilar or no tags within them. If you only have a few files, it's no big deal to find the duplicates but what if your growing collection of
mp3 files and digital photos are in the hundreds, even thousands? We certainly have the hard drive capacities to store all that stuff but duplicates are not only wasteful of space, they can also lead to confusion and a myriad of misfiling problems. And what about similar images? You may not want 4 pictures of the same thing you quickly took at just a slightly different angle. But when you downloaded everything from that 2 gigabyte memory card in your camera a few weeks later, you may not remember those similar images you took. But now there are two applications available from Bolide Software that can help you single everything out.

Audio Comparer is a program that actually "listens" to audio files. Using some fairly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, Audio Comparer can listen to audio files at about a second per music file. At that rate, combing through all of your music should be pretty quick. Since the most frequent type of duplication is having the same music stored in a different compression format such as mp3, WMA and OGG files, it's a good thing that Audio Comparer works with all these formats. After doing its listening check, it displays them in different audio groups making duplicates easy to identify. Then it's just a matter of listening to them as a confirmation before deleting.

Image Comparer breezes though your digital photos in much the same way. Using a content-based image search AI technique, Image Comparer "looks" at your images and decides what may be a duplicate and won't be fooled if the images are rotated or reversed. However with Image Comparer you can actually adjust the level of visual similarity to let you further constrain or relax the results. This comes in handy when you want to eliminate photos with similar content like those 4 photos you quickly snapped of the same thing. To speed things up, it can automatically select the best image from the similar duplicates for you making the weeding out process even faster. As with audio, images come in a wide variety of file formats that can lead to accidental duplication and Image Comparer works with most of them.

Audio Comparer ($29.95) and Image Comparer ($34.95) require and work with most versions of Windows. Get them both as they make a perfect match.

www.bolidesoft.com

Jump to:
[ Index of Craig's Columns | Main Columns Page | Computer America Home Page ]