Image Comparer

There are lots of duplicate finders out there and some of them are better than others. These are really useful when it comes to hunting down duplicate files on your hard drive. Image Comparer is such a program, but it was designed just for images. Before you start thinking that it is kind of useless, you should know about its main feature. It doesn't just find pictures with the same name, but the ones with the same content, that actually look the same.

If you want to try it out, the package is just 3 and a half Mb. Installing it is not exactly a challenge. The process is straight forward and won't nag you with any additional requirements.

The interface is also straight forward. You can find a number of options in the top menus of the main window, but all you really need is placed on the toolbar a little lower. At first, the main part of the window features two buttons. One is for creating a gallery and the other, for opening a previously saved one. Creating a gallery involves just browsing for a folder containing images. After you select it, the program will immediately prompt you to save your gallery.

With your gallery selected, all that's left now is to click on a "compare" button from the toolbar and Image Comparer will find any duplicates you might have in that gallery. The results will be displayed in two ways on different tabs. The first tab is the gallery view where all images have been excluded, leaving just the duplicates. Under the image pairs tab, you can see the duplicates side by side. Even if the files have different names, creation dates and so on, the program will recognize their similarity. If you make some small modifications to one of the images, like writing or drawing something on it, the program will still see them as doubles and it will highlight the difference. You can set the sensitivity of the comparing process from 85 to 100%. At 85, the program includes images that have been modified and at 100 it only shows identical images. This is all you need to know in order to do a comparison. Just select a gallery and click a button. There's no need to mention that you can also delete images using the interface.

You can either compare images from within a gallery or two galleries against each other. If you created a gallery and you have another one saved somewhere, all you need to do is to click the designated button on the interface. It's right next to the first "compare" button. You can also find a wizard which will guide you through some easy steps in order to compare images.