Prune Your Photo Library with fdupes

Productivity Sauce

If your photo library contains thousands of photos, chances are it has duplicate files lurking in its corners. But finding and removing these unwelcome guests can be tricky, unless you use the fdupes tool for the job. fdupes generates an md5sum hash on each file, and then returns files that have identical hashes (which almost certainly means that they are duplicates).

To put fdupes to practical use right away, run the fdupes -rSm /path/to/dir command. The -r parameter makes the command run recursively (i.e., it includes all sub-directories in the specified directory), while the -S and -m parameters generate a summary that includes the size of the duplicate file. To interactively remove duplicates, run the fdupes -rd /path/to/dir command that finds duplicates recursively and prompts you to delete them one-by-one.