Looks The Same???
by Gary Woods

If you're a photographer and love to take pictures I can almost guarantee that your hard drive is about full. The thing about digital photography is you don't have to print every picture you take so man; you take a lot of them. I've seen you up and down State St clicking your little hearts out. And, of that amazing number of photos you've taken I'll bet there's a ton of duplicates. So, when it's time to unload that hard drive you'll need something to help you find all those dupes so you can get them off your drive and keep on clicking.

To help you find those photos there's a cool piece of software from MindGems called Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder. This program finds duplicate photos in the way that a human does, identifying duplicate images even if they are in different formats and different bit depths and image sizes.

You can specify a percentage of image similarity that will be used during the scan. This percentage level can broaden the results or you can specify exact match varying only in image format and/or size. To check out the software you can download it from MindGems at http://www.mindgems.com/index.htm and run it through its paces. This scan will identify your duplicate pictures but if won't delete them. If you like what you see and want to continue forward and delete those pictures you can then purchase the program for $24.95.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at gandlwoods@earthlink.net or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910