Option for skipping duplicates on ingest

[humanclock]

Newbie here so apologies if this functionality exists somewhere, but I couldn't find anything in the docs/forums.

From what I've gathered from searching though the forums is that detecting duplicate photos upon ingest isn't totally ideal (due to overhead, etc).  I just would like some (obviously optional) way of in the event of a naming collision within the same folder upon ingest, PM would prompt me with a dialog box (configurable with vars) containing the original photo/info and the one to be ingested/info and ask me if I wish to skip the ingest for that photo or proceed with the rename.   This way I could visually tell if this photo was indeed a duplicate and act accordingly.

Or better yet (if possible), have another option that upon a naming collision during ingest, PM will do some sort of byte by byte comparison of the actual photodata (not metadata) and see if the photos are the same...if so automatically skip/etc.  This should be optional though because it could slow down ingesting.

The reason I'm asking this is that currently I'm in the process of moving 9 years of photos into PM.  I have backups of backups (of backups) on random hard disks.  I've encountered situations before where I thought my original photos were intact, then one day go looking for a particular photo only to find that it had been mysteriously deleted (or in a few cases, corrupted), so I wasn't even aware that my backup copy was actually the only copy of that file.   After I have everything in PM (and have the tree backed up of course!), I want to be able to go though and ingest all these extra backups I have to make sure they are safe to delete, even if it means my finger gets sore from having to hit the "skip" button for a half hour.

Craig

[Kirk Baker]

Craig,

Newbie here so apologies if this functionality exists somewhere, but I couldn't find anything in the docs/forums.

From what I've gathered from searching though the forums is that detecting duplicate photos upon ingest isn't totally ideal (due to overhead, etc).  I just would like some (obviously optional) way of in the event of a naming collision within the same folder upon ingest, PM would prompt me with a dialog box (configurable with vars) containing the original photo/info and the one to be ingested/info and ask me if I wish to skip the ingest for that photo or proceed with the rename.   This way I could visually tell if this photo was indeed a duplicate and act accordingly.

Or better yet (if possible), have another option that upon a naming collision during ingest, PM will do some sort of byte by byte comparison of the actual photodata (not metadata) and see if the photos are the same...if so automatically skip/etc.  This should be optional though because it could slow down ingesting.

The reason I'm asking this is that currently I'm in the process of moving 9 years of photos into PM.  I have backups of backups (of backups) on random hard disks.  I've encountered situations before where I thought my original photos were intact, then one day go looking for a particular photo only to find that it had been mysteriously deleted (or in a few cases, corrupted), so I wasn't even aware that my backup copy was actually the only copy of that file.   After I have everything in PM (and have the tree backed up of course!), I want to be able to go though and ingest all these extra backups I have to make sure they are safe to delete, even if it means my finger gets sore from having to hit the "skip" button for a half hour.

There are several applications that can analyze files/folders for duplicates (DupeWatcher, Comparator, etc.) that would do an excellent job of weeding out the duplicates before you go any further.

Since your photos are already on your computer, you don't need to Ingest them at all.  Photo Mechanic is foremost a browser and is perfectly suited to working with your photos where they already are.  There is really no 'moving photos into Photo Mechanic' at this point since it is not a cataloging application.

I hope this explains things a bit.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

-Kirk

[humanclock]

Thanks for the response.  By "moving to Photo Mechanic" I just meant ingesting them all so the files all have consistent naming/directory structure. Years of different cameras/etc have produced a lot of different photos all using the same filename.

I'll probably just ingest everything, backups and all and then throw together a simple script to traverse the tree and flush out the dupes. (or try one of the programs you mentioned)

Regardless, I really like this program and would even mow its lawn if it had one.

thanks,
Craig