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I am wondering if there is a way to compare folders in Ubuntu? I have tried to organize my photo folders many times...and for this reason I have several folders that contain the same files (maybe a couple of extra ones) and it would be great to have a tool to figure out which files are extra and which files are identical.

P.S. I have just found an application that works well. It's called FSlint. Here is a link to it with a detailed description: http://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/clean-up-ubuntu-remove-duplicates-with-fslint-filesystem-lint/

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  • I initially voted to close it as a duplicate but now I don't think it's a duplicate because it's about finding images.
    – Sergey
    Nov 7, 2012 at 23:43
  • This question appears to be relevant: askubuntu.com/questions/59107/… Dec 14, 2012 at 4:57

4 Answers 4

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diff will help you find duplicate files in two different directories, but if your mess is greater or if, for any other reason, you want to find duplicate (exact) image files in a whole directory, including subdirectories, you can use the gthumb image browser viewer, which is probably already installed in your system.

Gthumb provides a tool to search for duplicate media/audio/video/images/text/all files in a directory. To do this, just select your directory in the view mode that displays a left pane with your directory tree, and then, from the menu select Edit>Find duplicates... a dialogue window shows the duplicates and lets you choose which file(s) to delete. This procedure is visual and helpful in many cases; but it is slow, if you have too many duplicate files to delete.

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  • Thanks for the answer. Can gthumb also compare 2 folders and tell me which files are the same or different in them?
    – Elysium
    Nov 9, 2012 at 1:09
  • I don't think so. Use diff for that or ... there are other tools, I can't recall their names, for that purpose. Nov 9, 2012 at 2:14
  • What do you think about filezilla, xxdiff and kdiff3 filezilla-project.org kdiff3.sourceforge.net furius.ca/xxdiff Nov 9, 2012 at 2:33
  • If you want to use gThumb, the following may be practical or not depending on the amount of files you have: You can put both directories inside a new directory; then use gThumb to find duplicates in that new dir; then you proceed to browse the results and/or delete the copies you want according to which directory they belong to. Nov 9, 2012 at 3:29
  • Hey Robert. I must say that Gthumb is a great application, but I have just found 10.000 duplicates and deleting them one by one seems to be a tedious task to do. :) I need to find another way.
    – Elysium
    Nov 9, 2012 at 13:33
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just use diff directory1 directory2

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  • That wouldn't work well for directories full of binary files
    – Sergey
    Nov 7, 2012 at 23:31
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    It would. All it says is only in directory1: someFile
    – pbfy0
    Nov 8, 2012 at 0:00
  • Ok, you're right, diff is smart enough to not try to compare binary files line by line. And -r option even allows to compare directories recursively. Nice.
    – Sergey
    Nov 8, 2012 at 0:12
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If you want to find duplicate files, you can use fdupes program as explained in this question: How to find (and delete) duplicate files

However, with a photo collection this won't find different versions of an image (you can have multiple copies of an image with different metadata, different resolution etc.)

To find dupolicated images you can use DigiKam, which is in general an awesome tool for managing a photo collection. It has Find Duplicate Images Tool:

find duplicate images tool

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  • I'll have a look and let you know how they work. Thanks.
    – Elysium
    Nov 7, 2012 at 23:49
  • Sorry to say, but this application has many issues. You cant select several images. I have 10.000 photos...so this is an application that would not replace the tedious manual work at all. Thanks anyway.
    – Elysium
    Nov 10, 2012 at 8:04
  • @Elysium: what do you mean by "You cant select several images"? I ran "Find duplicates" on my collection of photos, ~60.000 of them, and it appears to do what it says on the box. Unlike diff or any other file-based method, it also finds duplicates even if file format is different (JPEG/RAW etc.)
    – Sergey
    Nov 10, 2012 at 15:32
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You may want to have a look at dupeGuru Picture Edition. Seems like one of the best options to me, if not the best, handling also similar (non-identical) images.

For exact duplicates and scripting you might use duff.

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  • I can vouch for these tools as well.
    – belacqua
    Oct 4, 2015 at 2:12
  • gThumb provides thumbnail images when comparing duplicates, but it kept causing a kernel panic and crashing my machine when I'd try to find duplicates across 60k files. dupeGuru doesn't have thumbnail previews, but it handled the massive number of files I had with ease. Thanks for the suggestion! Nov 27, 2021 at 18:42

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