Been going thru my old XP, Win7, Win10 hard-drives & lots of CDs&DVDs. Many, many pictures and old notes. Many duplicates through out all of these medias. Also some in folders, some in the root of the media. Is there any programs or apps that scan, compare and find & index duplicate files? I can then organize all and write all to a single archive drive with no dup files. In the old days, I just copied all an a large disk and did not write over repeated file names. Still, dup files can be in different folders. There has to be a smarter way.
There's a number of apps that do this but I haven't tried any of them. You can manually do this in Windows 10, but not sure about Win7 or XP... https://www.techbout.com/find-delete-duplicate-photos-windows-78520/
It is now called Photo Legacy. I had to download and install it on my Win11 box. Not what I had in mind but a start. Looks like I still have to copy all on my big drive and let it run. I'll give it a try after my first liquid courage.
Whatever you use to transfer make sure it keeps the original file dates. I tried to archive thousands and thousands of pictures on a Network drive but it wouldn’t keep the original dates. Ended up backing it all up to my drop box account instead. I must have over 50k pictures and not having them by dates just doenst work.
I do understand that. I'm finding that the file explorer (as usual) is worthless. So many pictures already scattered in a bunch of folders. However, The Photo Legacy ap is still scanning a net drive. Poor drive sounds like it about to launch like a frisbee. Maybe here with some index or master folder, I can see the dups beyond folder boundaries.
I think you can do a search for *.jpg thru multiple directories and then copy the results to an external drive
