We are working on several big topics right now - like building a
new 64 bit with extended abilities, creating movie contact sheets
or finding duplicate items. We’re quite excited about these, and
today, we want to tell you about finding duplicates.
The basic idea is, of course, to compare a number of catalogs, and
find out any duplicate or unique items on them. So you can see what
items take up space unnecessarily; or which files are not yet on
your backup drive; or what photos on your friends’ drive are not
yet in your own collection.
It’s a little more complicated than finding items, though, since
you want to compare every item in every catalog with every item in
another catalog. So, we’re currently working on fleshing that out,
getting the basic comparisons to work, and offering different
comparison options and configurations - while also keeping the
whole operation reasonably fast.
So right now we’re offering different criteria to determine if
items are duplicates of each other: same size, same name, same
kind, same modification dates or same FileCheck value. We plan on
leaving you the option of choosing what constitutes duplicity based
on your needs or the task at hand.
Also, we will offer narrowing the scope of the search - you will be
able to limit the comparison (and its results) by item kind, item
size, or item date - resulting in more focused results and
increased search performance.
We’re still battling a little over the way to display these
results. Right now, we are filling them in a tree view, grouping
duplicates under their original, and separating uniques in their
own branch as well. This could also be achieved with different list
views, but we’re still experimenting with that. In any case, you
will be able to work with the results, eg exporting them to an
album or an XML, and probably even copying, moving or deleting them
from their original locations as well.
It’s a pretty huge and powerful new function, and we’re hoping to
get that on the road soon enough. Let us know what you think, or if
you have ideas or suggestions for us.