


FSV as mentioned, Bulk Renaming Utility and even Windows 10 has a simplified version of batch processing. This part of the exercise could be done by any other program you have that does batch renaming. In order to solve this problem, using Adobe Bridge's reasonably powerful batch processor, I am going through all the folders and renaming these according to the contents and at the same time adding keywords. On my first drive, it has found over 8,500 dupe names of which, I have discovered, a good many are raw files I hadn't renamed upon retrieval from the camera. In this regard, ACDSee has done a fantastic job.

I intend to check one hard drive at a time, firstly finding duplicate names, rectify these, then move on to finding actual duplicates. What I have done is downloaded 6 of the most recommended software packages and going to give them all a good workout. It's all a big mess with originals mixed in with jpeg's, tiff, png, psd and other edits, not to mention several backups of each. I have been using FSV (a great free program) for years and it is my go to for quick viewing and image comparison however, with something like 80,000 images to tidy up, spread across umpteen folders and several hard drives, I need a program to tell me where they are.

Have you tried the dupe Thanks for the suggestion. I noticed in the topic about "DAM", you mention using ACDSee. If anyone has any experience with either of these or other brands or just suggestions in general, I would love to hear from you. So far in my search, I have found that 2 programs called ' Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro' and 'ACDSee Ultimate' offer (IMHO) the best solution. Whilst Lightroom can sort of find dupes, I don't find it does a good job and was thinking specialised software is the go. I have been researching Google for the best software to find these duplicates however, it's a jungle out there with a myriad of suggestions and arguments, sometimes verging on world war 3. My workflow has improved somewhat (but still open to suggestions), and now I want to clean up. In my earlier years of PP, I was creating lots of new images every time I made changes and never going back and deleting them. The one area I really need to fix up is duplicates. After years of abuse of any form of true workflow, just being part of this community and reading all the advice from everybody is encouraging me to change my habits.
