Day 5: 31 Day Photo Decluttering Challenge

Got a lot of photos? Do you want to be able to enjoy your pictures instead of having to search and search to find your favourites? Does the thought of tackling your photo collection seem so overwhelming that you keep putting it off? Me too!

That's why this month I'm hosting the 31 Day Photo Decluttering Challenge! Each day I'll share tips to help you declutter your photo collection so you can really treasure and enjoy all the best ones. And I'll share my progress as I declutter my photos along with you :)

Today I want to share some apps that help eliminate duplicate digital photos. Chances are you have some of those in your collection :)

Today's Photo Decluttering Tip - Use a Duplicate Finder App for Digital Pics

I know many of you have been working on decluttering your digital photos and one of the biggest problems with digital photos is duplicates. It's easy for photos to be saved multiple times:

You may have forgotten you already saved some photos
You may have accidentally copied a folder more than once
Sometimes if you're selecting multiple photos if you move the mouse or your finger slightly wrong you can copy all those photos unintentionally
You may have copied some pics to another folder to find them back easily for sharing or printing or using for a project of some sort

You may not even be aware of how many duplicate pictures you have on your hard drive or in the cloud.

Using a duplicate finder will help you choose which of the photos you want to keep and which ones you want to delete. It saves you a lot of time and frees up space on your computer.

Duplicate Picture Finder Apps / Programs

There's lots of software out there for finding duplicate photos. Not knowing where to start, I asked my friend Trish who is a Certified Personal Photo Organizer and runs Pictures In Place.

Trish uses a Mac and recommends Photosweeper. She said most photo organizers who are on a Mac use it and recommend it.

Since I'm on a PC, she asked around to other photo organizers and these 3 were recommended:

And just a heads up: one that is NOT recommended is CC Cleaner - lots of viruses when you download it.

Trish hasn't used these 3 personally, but interestingly, these were highly recommended online when I searched for reviews as well. They all seem to be fairly similar at their core, with a few different bells and whistles to make them unique. Take a look at each one and decide which will be best for your collection. {I'm not an affiliate for any of these programs by the way.}

My Experience With Duplicate Finding Software

I tried the free version of Duplicate Cleaner a few days ago and it was very helpful and easy to use.

There are a variety of settings available in most of these programs so you can decide the degree of matching you want. I went for exact matches and it found a lot of duplicates.

I was worried about not being able to control which duplicate photos were deleted, but the way I set it up I had total control. I chose which folders to search through. Then the program grouped duplicates together but didn't delete anything. Next there were choices available for how to mark the photos for removal. I chose the setting to keep one from each group. That way I knew there was no chance of all the copies being deleted somehow. There are other options for marking them too including location, file size, date taken, etc.

Once I'd checked the "keep one from each group" setting I went through the list and made sure the picture that was kept in each group was the one I wanted kept. There were some that I changed so that I was able to keep the one in the folder I wanted it and delete the pics in other locations. Saves moving them around later.

I plan to take another pass through later this month and look for similar photos because I know I have a LOT of those too. But with how large my collection is, I will do smaller folders at that time, so the list that is generated isn't too overwhelming.

I haven't tried any of the other apps Trish recommended, but I'd love to hear your feedback on which ones you use!

My Photo Decluttering Progress

I decluttered some of my printed photos today. I went through 2 albums that contained my oldest printed photos. These albums were filled with pictures of my great grandparents, my grandparents, my parents' younger years, their engagement and wedding, and my early years.

There was some overlap in these two albums (one was originally put together for me and one was for someone else). There also were some photos from these albums that were in my baby book and my parents' mini wedding album.

Yep that's me on Santa's lap :)

I decluttered 44 photos and 3 albums. That was about 1/4 of the photos from these albums. These albums were different from my more recent albums in that they weren't filled with lots of similar poses. There were only a few pictures of each person or event. And those were special and significant photos. So I mainly decluttered pics that were actual doubles.

Your Turn!

Today's task is to read up on the recommended duplicate photo finder programs and choose one to try out. Then drop one of your folders in that you know has duplicates and see what happens! If you're happy with how it works then go ahead and try more photos or your whole collection.

If you're not decluttering digital photos, then spend time today on the duplicates in your printed photo collection. Declutter doubles that you kept but never gave to anyone. Or pics that you have in more than one place (framed, baby book, family album, etc.).

If you'd like more decluttering ideas, you can check out my Decluttering/Purging Tips & Ideas board on Pinterest.

How are you doing in the 31 Day Photo Decluttering Challenge so far? How do you think today's tip will help you? Which program do you think will work best for you? What photos are you decluttering today? How many duplicate photos did you find?

Happy decluttering and organizing!