Dupe Finders and One-Liners

Welcome back, dear readers. This week your chef had to take his act out on the road again, despite his notable lack of wanderlust. Thus your chef was faced today with the choice of strolling around his hotel’s serene Japanese garden and exploring the surroundings in a new city, or spending many hours evaluating new utility software and writing his recommendations. Maybe this will give you a clue about his choice:

Eliminate Double Vision

A reader mailed in to ask about software for detecting duplicate digital photos on your disk. Such programs try to identify duplicate pictures by examining their sizes or even the actual images. I suggested that he try these programs:

DupDetector (free; compares images by content; apparently orphaned by its developer, and not certified for Vista)

VisiPics (free; compares images by content)

Image Comparer ($35; compares images by content)

Image File DeDuper (also known as JPeg DeDuper; free; compares by file size first, then by content) (another reader commented that JPeg De-Duper is very fast with very few false positives, but misses some duplicates)

DoubleKiller Pro ($20), which also has a free version.

Md5sums (free; command-line tool that only compares file checksums)

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