Find Duplicate Media Files in Your PC with MediaPurge

When I bought my first digital camera, I was so much addicted to using it that I was snapping hundred of pictures and making dozens of videos everyday. I was copying all these videos to my computer’s hard disk and before I could realize, my hard disk was full. When you just keep copying media files in your PC, chances are that you copy them more than once in different folders. This way you end up having duplicate media files on your PC consuming all the valuable disk space on the hard disk.

You can use a tool called MediaPurge to find all the duplicate media files on your hard disk. This tool is especially designed to find media duplicates and uses some unique methods for this. For example, it can listen to the audio stream from various media files to see if they are identical, it can compare the files with similarities in the file information and it can perform a full bit-by-bit comparison.

MediaPurge works in 5 steps. In the first step, you pick a function – for finding duplicate media files, you have to choose Find duplicate files. Immediately following this, you have to choose one of the methods to detect identical files – compare them by file information, compare them by listening to audio stream and compare them bit-by-bit. In the second step, you have to pick a list of folders containing the media files. You can define restrictions or exclusions in the third step. In the fourth step, it will execute the actions and scan the selected folders for identical files. And in the final fifth step, you would be able to view the results and make decision if you want to delete the duplicate files. Obviously you can preview all the media files to see for yourself if these files are really identical.

MediaPurge

While testing with a few MP3 and MPG files, it detected many duplicate files. Some of the files were far from being identical, but others were duplicates only using different video codecs. So there were hits and miss both. But even if it finds a few huge media files as duplicate, you can easily save many gigabytes of disk space.

You can download MediaPurge from http://www.peter-ebe.de/Mediapurge/info/mediapurge_download_en.php.