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I have a lot of printed photos which I have been digitalising. As it happens, some photos were printed more than once, and as such they have been digitalised more than once. I am trying to find those photos so I can delete duplicates.

This is a similar question, however, the duplicates as stated in that question seem to come from the same digital image. In my case, the photos are scans of different physical photos, so two duplicate questions might differ a bit more (e.g. slightly different lighting).

The software should scan a folder of images and compare the photos in the folder to each other and return in some way images that are very similar (two scans of the same physical photo) so the user can delete duplicates manually (after confirming by comparing the images manually).

Requirements for the software:

  • Work on Windows (could also be web-based);

  • Free or paid;

  • Able to import a folder of images (let's say a few hundred images in a folder) and compare the images in that folder.

This question is also very similar, however, it asks to sort images by similarity. My question is more specific about what I mean by similar (i.e. different scan of the same photo).

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    I've deleted my answer, as it was completely incorrect. I have the correct software somewhere on my collection of about thirty flash drives. I made an error based on the program installed on my computer, which isn't suited for your purposes. If I can find the correct one, I'll repost.
    – fred_dot_u
    Commented Aug 23, 2018 at 16:00
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    For the technical part: IMHO the images could differ by a few degrees, e.g. +/- 5°, then by 85-95°, 175-185° and 265-275°. Next they could differ in color as you said. Could also differ in resultion (pixel count, due to different DPI settings)? Could they also differ in size (cm, because they were printed in different sizes)?
    – Thomas Weller
    Commented Aug 23, 2018 at 19:47
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    @ThomasWeller Yes (to all). The images are scanned using a phone camera and an app determines the border of the images. Therefore, I think the software really needs to use some image processing technique. I know there is software to detect certain objects (e.g. to find picture with cars or cats in them). That software if obviously trained using huge libraries. In this case, I think it would have to determine features or patterns in each picture and then compare those. Obviously, this won't get all duplicates and might flag FPs, but it would be much easier than doing it manually.
    – JJJ
    Commented Aug 23, 2018 at 20:03
  • I think newer versions of Lightroom can do this, even without the help of plugins. See photo.stackexchange.com/questions/10213/… but I haven't tried any of these tips myself.
    – knb
    Commented Aug 24, 2018 at 8:39

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There are some programs that work decently enough. Unfortunately, one of them is (I think) no longer under development. It is a pity.

VisiPics rates the similarity using colors. http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

Pixiple give you also similar images, this can be handy to detect the same image with some changes in cropping or rotation but will detect for example images from the same photoshoot, so be careful that your "delete" finger is not too loose. https://github.com/olaolsso/pixiple

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