Adobe Lightroom is an indispensable part of many commercial photographers around. From organizing & converting RAW images, making tonal adjustments to handling routine processing, Lightroom has been featured with added tons of features. It is typically used alongside Adobe’s family software such as Photoshop and Bridge to make brighter designs with full capabilities.
Duplicate photos are a real menace. They will eat up valuable storage space, cause all kinds of data clutter, and the mess slows down file search because of the increased number of files. So get rid of Lightroom photos and see how much space you can recover this way.
Delete Lightroom Duplicate Photos Safely
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Adobe Lightroom V/s Photoshop
As a newbie in the world of digital photo editing, we often get stuck with the question whether to use Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, and most importantly, what is the core difference between these two.
In truth, there’s no clear-cut answer. This is primarily due to the fact that both of these programs have their own pros and cons, and they are designed specifically keeping in mind different needs and circumstances.
Lightroom has been with us for a little over compared to Adobe’s family software Photoshop which is known as the gold standard in graphics editing, and has been known for decades.
Photoshop is a powerful image editing software, typically used by professional photographers, digital graphics designers, creative content publishers, and architects. With Photoshop, a designer can get close to almost little dots of color and make changes to it. Photoshop allows bulk editing, and many other image manipulation features that are almost impossible to process in your digital camera.
On the contrary, Adobe Lightroom is a professional custom tailored software which offers some of the editing features in Photoshop along with greater support for photo organization. This means that, in a single software you can edit photographs, manage & organize them. You don’t need a third-party photo organizer software at all.
Lightroom Is A Non-Destructive Image Editor
Adobe Lightroom is popularly known as a non-destructive image editor. This is because every time you edit a photo with Lightroom, you don’t have to worry about accidentally messing up with any of its elements. Even if anything goes wrong while changing the color preset, clipping, blurring, resizing, contrast, effects, balance, noise, enhancement, background or anything else, you can undo the changes on unlimited number of times – even after several days, months or years.
Yes, you read it right. Unlike any other photo editor software, Lightroom does not make changes to the contents of the original image file. In fact, the information about the edits is stored in an altogether different file known as Lightroom Catalog. This serves as a database with a complete history of user-made edits to photos.
Why Should I Use Lightroom?
If you’re a professional photographer, you need better organization of your photos. Lightroom has a bulk import feature that automatically scans for photos on your hard disk, and creates a database of the same. The application accurately picks up the right colors for tweaks using the adjustment slider. You can also batch edit the exposure level to all photos at once.
As a photographer, when you shoot a photo you’ve the option to save it in your preferred file format. If you select JPEG image type, your photos are automatically processed with the in-house software in your digital camera. There’s really little point in further editing those photos because each time you make some changes to the file, it degrades the picture quality. On the contrary, with the RAW image type, your original photos are stored unprocessed. You can manipulate them without degrading image quality using a specialized software such as Adobe Lightroom.
Lightroom Duplicates
Image duplication is a common problem faced by many photographers. A commercial photographer shoots and processes thousands of images every month, and there’s little or no time to reorganize the library and find duplicate photos.
This is due to the fact that duplicates are mostly scattered across different folders, sub-folders and drives. There may be some identical copies located on the digital photo camera, external hard disk and USB stick, each with a different name or type.
And most importantly, your digital camera stores your shoots with sequential file names and random characters (such as DSC21800.JPG, DSC21801.JPG) with no relation to the actual contents. The manufacturer of your digital camera assumes that each time you shoot some new photos, you’ll spend time renaming all those photographs, while in reality, most photographers consistently fail to do so due to hefty schedule.
Worry not, there is a way to deal with bulk duplicates. If you’re a digital photographer and looking for a way to get this job done automatically, a small yet powerful tool PictureEcho could be a great help.
- Make sure you’ve already closed Adobe Lightroom.
- Download Sorcim’s PictureEcho from the official website and scan duplicate photos in Lightroom.
- Double-click the downloaded setup, and install the program on your computer.
- Open PictureEcho and click on the Adobe Lightroom tab in the main user interface.
- Select one of the following matching rules based on your needs:
- Exact Match: This makes a list of all duplicate photos with no differences. Each image file is compared by it’s Hash and files matching the similar hash values are displayed.
- Similar Match: This initiates partial match mechanism that can find duplicates with little differences in terms of image background, color tunes, dimensions and exposure.
- After selecting one of the above similarity criteria, click on the Start Search button.
- PictureEcho will start scanning and show up the results in a list box with basic details about each file – such as name, image thumbnail, path, size, and type.
- Once you’re done reviewing your images, click the Select Duplicates button and choose one of the existing bulk selection criteria. For example: PictureEcho allows you to mark newest/ oldest images in each group, smaller/ bigger images in each group, low/ high resolution images in each group, and so on.
- Now, click on Select Action and choose what you would like to do with your duplicates (Move to Folder/ Move to Recycle Bin).
