DuplicateDestroyer

Manipulating pictures on a daily basis might leave some duplicates around until you manage to organize them as intended. Sure enough, a picture or two doesn’t do much harm, but on the long run you can end up with a lot of disk space taken up for no reason. Luckily, specialized applications like DuplicateDestroyer want to help you out.

Although it comes as a default feature in modern Windows iterations, you might want to check if .NET Framework is on your computer, because the application relies on it to function. Running it puts you up against a compact, intuitive window, but not before showing a dialog with a detailed description of the process.

Note that the application isn’t capable of processing all types of files, and focuses its attention to pictures. Various formats are supported, so you can rest assured that popular image types are taken into account. More than that, identified items are processed on the spot, so you might want to be sure of the source directory.

Choosing folders of interest needs to be done through the program’s browse dialogs, and it would have been useful to see a context menu integration for instant trigger of a scan operation. The output folder is automatically created with your consent if it doesn’t exist, with a default path already provided.

Once you hit “run” the application starts to scan the source folder and subdirectories to identify duplicate pictures. Different algorithms are used, and duplicates aren’t just represented by name. Detected items are moved to the output folder, with a prompt letting you know how many items got moved, with the destination folder also brought up.

Bottom line is that the better you keep your computer organized, the more efficiently you can take advantage of its features. Simple applications like DuplicateDestroyer help clean different elements, in this case picture duplicates. The job is neatly done, even though duplicates aren’t removed, letting you decide what happens next.