Image Comparitor

Having to work with large quantities of pictures on a daily basis can surely leave one or two duplicates, especially if you frequently arrange them in new collections, or categories. Luckily, developers came up with specialized applications like Image Comparitor which aim to hunt down duplicate pictures, and remove them with little effort.

First of all, the application skips you the whole effort of going through a setup process, and can run from the moment download is done. However, for this to be possible, you need to make sure that Java Runtime Environment is found on your computer, because it’s a mandatory requirement for functionality.

The application needs to be pointed towards a folder containing pictures which presumably have duplicates among them. Subfolders are included as well, without an option to disable this. Loading needs to be done through the built-in browse dialog, because drag and drop is not supported.

It can take a bit of time before the list of detected files is displayed, but this only depends on the depth structure of folders, and the amount of pictures found inside. The list only shows what the application identifies as duplicates, letting you select them before continuing with other operations.

Selecting a picture makes a side panel slide in, which contains thumbnails for the original, and duplicate. Sadly, you can’t get a better view at pictures, which are shown in an incredibly small preview area. What’s more, there’s no possibility to jump to the source folder, while the list only shows files according to name, and not the path.

In case you don’t want to spend the time to manually select which files to remove, there’s a button which marks all of them as duplicates. Without the possibility to move them to a different location, your only option is to delete selected items.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Image Comparitor comes in handy for spotting duplicate pictures to clean your collections, and save some disk space. Portability is a major advantage, but it could have used a better preview system, option to move files to a separate location, or built-in search.