[X4U] Duplicate files

[Stroller]

On Nov 28, 2005, at 11:35 pm, Richard Gilmore wrote:
> ...
> Awhile back I lost several thousand photos I had backed up on a Linux 
> box
> (long story) anyway I've been going through several DVD backups I have 
> and
> have been finding some photos on these discs that I thought were lost 
> so
> I've been trying to bring them all together in one place and just 
> importing
> whole folders. But I've been finding many of the same photos on these 
> DVDs
> and now I've got hundreds perhaps thousands of duplicate photos with
> absolutely identical file names. I thought iPhoto would screen the 
> dupes out
> but it didn't.
>
> I think I'd rather use a tool to find the duplicates rather than 
> opening
> numerous folders and clicking and dragging. I think it's just too many
> files/folders to deal with. I just want all the dupes in the iPhoto 
> folder
> moved out to another folder that I will backup just in case then 
> delete.

Coming to this late, I'm sure that this has been discussed already in 
the last few weeks, possibly on the Unix 4 Mac list. A number of usages 
of `find` were suggested, IIRC, but I'm not sure that iPhoto, on 
startup, would be happy about files in its index that are missing 
because they've been removed by another program.

I believe you can tell iPhoto to rebuild its index by holding down a 
command key as you start it up but IMHO the best way to remove 
duplicates already within iPhoto would be to use an Applescript to call 
the iPhoto delete functions, so that iPhoto is aware of the file 
changes; I'd personally MD5 the files to ensure they're duplicates 
you're removing, not just ones with the same name (and so that you 
don't get duplicates with different names).

IMHO the best way to handle all your back-ups is to delete all of those 
from iPhoto & start again. Copy all the photos off the backups into 
_folders_ then you can trivially run `for foo in `ls -R`; do md5 $foo ; 
other stuff ; done`. I would only import into iPhoto once I was 
confident I'd recovered all the photos I was going to be able to get 
and removed all duplicates.

Stroller.