The crowd has spoken. We featured an application earlier today that lets you compare images in your library to find dupicate pictures. And a whole bunch of you wrote in to let us know that Dup Detector does the same thing, only better. So we checked it out and you're kind of right, and you're kind of not.

Dup Detector is certainly faster than DupliFinder. And it has many more features. But it's possible it has a few too many features. It took us a couple of minutes to figure out how to load a folder. Once we did, Dup Detector scanned over 2000 images in a bout a minute. When we clicked the Find dups button, the program processed them in a matter of seconds.

For the record, here's how to load a single folder:

1. Select the Get data tag
2. Click Build
3. Click Browse
4. Navigate to the folder of your choice
5. Click OK
6. Selet the Find dups tab
7. Click Find dups
8. Select the View Dups tab to actually see the duplicates

You can change the algorithm for detecing similar images. But this is where DupliFinder excels. It does an excellent job of finding images that actually bear a resemblance to one another, while Dup Detector wil spit out a bunch of pictures with similar colors. In other words, if you have a lot of pictures with white backgrounds, Dup Detector will count them as duplicates. You can avoid this by setting the "Dup if within" percentage to something near 100%.

Ever wish you could scan your entire photo directory to find and delete duplicate images? Sure, one or two pictures here and there might not take up that much space. But when you realize that you've accidentally stored your entire wedding album in three different folders, that's a whole different story. Of course, you don't want to start deleting images until you're absolutely certain they're identical. And that's where DupliFinder comes in.

This Windows-only utility will scan any directory (and optionally its subdirectories) and look for identical images. But that's not all. It will also look for images that are compositionally similar. As you can see in the screenshot, this means you won't just find exact copies of an image, but also pictures that look a little bit like your original image. This can come in handy if you're looking for another picture of your kid or dog to send to your parents. Or you know, if you're looking for a picture of a microphone.

It takes a while to scan large directories. And the open dialog is a bit awkward. You can either browser your My Pictures folder, or you can drag and drop a directory to DupliFinder from Windows Explorer. There's no way to navigate to folders outside of your My Documents directory with the browse feature.

[via Lifehacker]