How to Find Duplicates in Picasa 3

Duplicate photos and other digital images can appear due to copying and pasting into multiple folders, taking up extra space on your hard drive and muddling your filing system. Finding those duplicate files for deletion can be difficult. If you use Picasa 3, however, you are in luck. An experimental feature in that program allows you to view all your duplicate files, visually scan them and selectively delete them .

Things You'll Need

• Computer with Picasa 3
• Photos

Instructions

1. Launch Picasa 3 on your computer. If you do not have Picasa 3, you can download and install it for free from the link provided in the "Resources" section of this article

2. Allow Picasa 3 a few minutes to scan your hard drive for images and index them. You will know that Picasa 3 is scanning by a small, "flag"-type notification popping in and out at the lower left corner of your monitor.

3. Click "View" in the top menu bar and select "Library" to view all of your images in Picasa 3. The program will display all the photos and images it indexed, including all duplicate files.

4. From the top menu bar, select "Tools", "Experimental" and "Show duplicate files".

5. Visually scan the displayed images to discover where they exist on your hard drive.

Tips & Warnings

• To make sure Picasa is scanning all your photos for duplicates, add all possible folders to Picasa. Go to "File" and "Add folder to Picasa" and add all folders that might contain images.

• Picasa 3 does not display duplicate files side-by-side. Be careful when deleting duplicate files so that you do not accidentally delete both copies.

References

• Duplicate photos : Fix a Problem - Picasa Help

Resources

• Picasa