Finding Duplicate Photos
If you’re like most photographers out there, when you take a photo of someone (or something), you don’t just take one. You take 18 or more. It’s totally normal. We figure the more photos we take, the better chance we have that at least one photo will be exactly what we want. The problem comes when we’re trying to organize our photos. We tend to build up huge libraries of photos that include a bunch of duplicates. I’m not talking exact filename duplicates (as if we imported the same photo twice), but duplicates in that one photo looks just like another. Well, in Elements 10, a new feature was added to help find them.
Step One:
Let’s say you took some photos of a soccer game, and you wanted to quickly sort through them to find the best ones. Since it’s sports, chances are you were shooting in burst mode, so you’ll have 10–15 photos of basically the same play. You only really need one keeper, right? In the Organizer, select the group of photos you want to search through (you can press Ctrl-A [Mac: Command-A] to Select All, click on an album, or just Ctrl-click [Mac: Command-click] on as many images as you want to sort through). Then go under the Find menu, under By Visual Searches, and choose Search for Duplicate Photos. Depending on how many photos you’re looking through, it can take anywhere from a few seconds for 50 photos to a few minutes for a few thousand.
MATT KLOSKOWSKI
Step Two:
When Elements is done, you’ll see the Visually Similar Photo Search dialog open. Elements will put each series of photos that it finds similar into suggested groups. For me, it was kinda hard to really see what was in each group, because the thumbnails are so small. Since we’re going to actually do things with the photos in these series, you may want to increase the size of the thumbnails of the photos using the slider at the bottom left (circled here).
At this point, you’ve got two choices for what you can do with these suggested duplicate photos. First, you can look through the photos to find the best one from the series (which is why increasing the thumbnail size is important here), and then delete the rest, since you’ll probably never use them. To do that, simply click on one of the photos (or Ctrl-click to select multiple ones) and click the Remove From Catalog button at the bottom left of the dialog (circled here). If you do that, Elements will ask you if you simply want to remove the photos from the catalog or remove them from the hard disk, as well. I also remove them from the hard disk altogether, since I don’t need them anymore.
Step Four:
Your other option is to group the series of photos together in a stack. That way, when you’re looking at them in the Organizer, you’ll have fewer photos to look through since the entire series will be stacked. To stack the photos together, just click the Stack button above the right side of each group. Or, if you only want to stack certain photos from the group together, then select them first, and click the Stack button. When you’re done stacking (or removing the photos from the catalog), just click the Done button in the lower-right corner to return to the Organizer view.
