My friend Nikki writes a travel blog and often she encounters the problem of having too many identical looking images. She has been writing the travel blog since 2010 and it is nothing new for her to deal with identical or similar images. When I asked her how she grapples with the identical images, she told me about XnView which is a freeware image viewer, manager and converter for Windows. Using the features built inside anyone can find similar looking or exactly identical images in seconds.
So here is how we can use XnView to find similar images from any storage drive:
- Download XnView from https://www.xnview.com/en/xnview/. There are many editions available but all of them have the feature to find similar images. I recommend the minimal edition for this purpose as it is very small in size and a portable ZIP is also available.
- Launch XnView and select Tools → Find Similar Images from the menubar.
- In the window that opens up, we can add folders and files that we want to compare. We can choose to compare files from within subfolders. There are many methods for comparison – filename, file data, image data, picture content etc. When we select picture content comparison method, we can choose the degree of similarity in terms of percentage. For really similar images, the similarity should be above 85%.
- As we click on the Find button, it starts finding the similar images and displays each set of the similar images one by one in a wizard like fashion. We can keep clicking Next to see new set of similar images.
- Under any set of the similar images, we can right-click on the selected images from a set and choose operations such as delete, copy, move, etc.
XnView provides all the tools that one would need to work with the images. In addition to finding similar images, we can convert file formats of the images and create a file list of images in a folder.