Find Similar Photos
Annegret Mclean
I have tons of photos of whiteboards in Photos, and I would like to put them all in an album. Is there a way to get Photos to recognize similar photos (not duplicates) so that I can do that? Or does anyone know of a third party app that can do that for me?
The only idea I got is to resize the image to e.g. 5px*5px* 256 colors, create a string representation of it and then find the same. But I guess that it may have create tiny differences in colors even with just two same images with different size, so finding just the 100 % same would be useless.
So I would need some good format of that string representation of image which than could be used with some SQL function to find similar, or some other nice way. E.g. phash create perceptional hashes, so when two numbers are close, the images should be close as well, so i just need to find closest distances. But it is again external library.
My first idea that failed, similar to what you may be thinking, is I ended up making strings for every single image (no matter what size). But I quickly worked out this fills your database super fast, and wasn't effective.
When doing the search for images that are similar, I did the exact same process to the image they wanted to upload, and then extracted image 'hashes' from the database to compare them all, and see what had matching rounded rgb's.
Putting it down in an academical way, what you are looking for is a similarity function which takes in two images and returns an indicator how far/similar the two images are. This indicator could easily be a decimal number ranging from -1 to 1 (far apart to very close). Once you have this function you can set an image as a reference and compare all the images against it. Then finding the similar images to one is as simple as finding the closest similarity factor to it which is done with a simple search over a double field within an RDBMS like MySQL.
Now all that remains is how to define the similarity function. To be honest this is problem specific. It depends on what you call similar. But covariance is usually a good starting point, it just needs your two images to be of the same size which I think is of no big deal. Yet you can find lots of other ideas searching for 'similarity measures between two images'.
Now go ahead and scan some more folders where you could have photos, and after that, use the Photos scan mode to find similar photos in your Photos albums. Duplicate Photo Cleaner seamlessly integrates with Mac Photos and makes it easy to manage your albums there. No more boring similars!
Millions of people around the globe search for photos both for personal or professional purposes. We offer you the quickest tool that can search by image, keyword or image url to find the most similar photos online from the 4 leading search engines. Reverse Photo Lookup can be helpful to find an image with better angles and resolutions. Also users can search to find out if someone has used your pictures without your permission or you can use it to find the other sources of the image. Anyone can use this tool for free to do a reverse image search and for other features you can buy the pro version of this tool.
The Mac-only application is a significant upgrade from the previous version. If duplicate photos plague your Mac, Gemini 2 is an optimised and intuitive choice that takes the hassle out of locating all those duplicates that tend to fall between the cracks.
Fine-tuning the search parameters before and after a scan is painless and responsive. Gemini 2 is our choice of best duplicate photo finder software that streamlines your photo file management and optimises your hard disk space effortlessly.
Duplicate Files Fixer is a paid desktop software app available for both Mac and Windows. It makes our list of best duplicate photo finders & cleaners for its functionality and countless positive reviews.
PictureEcho provides a comprehensive tool for locating, storing and deleting duplicate images. A brilliant addition is a dedicated feature to scan Lightroom catalogues for duplicate files via the image finder. (One of the reasons Lightroom keeps crashing could be due to bloated image libraries.)
Photosweeper is ideal for photographers or people with large photo collections, finding and removing duplicate photos. Gemini 2 is a general-purpose duplicate file finder, suitable for all types of files including photos, music, and documents. It has a Smart Select feature, and can scan external drives and network locations, making it useful for multiple devices.
Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder looks at all selected JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG and TIFF photographs to find duplicates. It will also find and remove duplicate images that have been resized or even recoloured through editing apps.
The first scans for and locates exact duplicates where the file names are the same. The second sees the app search for similar images with variations in size, colour, rotation and even filename differences.
As the term suggests, it is a type of web search. However, it is much different from conventional text-based search. Unlike the traditional online search method, the reverse image search method requires users to use an image as a search query to find similar images. Once users upload a reference image as a search query, the search engine starts finding visually similar search results online based on the content featured in it. After a few seconds, the search engine displays photo search results with similar content in terms of structure, face, shape, and colors.
The reverse photo search method can search similar images online because of an AI-backed CBIR (Content-Based Image Retrieval) algorithm. This algorithm uses artificial intelligence and its subsets, including machine learning and computer vision. CBIR scans the image using computer vision when a picture is provided to an image search utility as a search query.
After the scan of the image, segmentation of the entire picture and the content it features is performed using AI. Once the segmentation task is complete, machine learning takes charge and tries to identify and match content. After that, the data acquired from these phases is processed to perform the web search and find similar images.
There could be various instances where users with different demographics and professions may need to perform a reverse photo search and find similar images. You may need to find similar photos online for various purposes. Here, we will discuss a few purposes that may trigger you to perform a reverse image search and find similar images online. Further details are given below.
The reverse image search by SmallSEOTools.com is much different from traditional search engines. However, it is as accurate as those platforms. In fact, in some cases, it is better than those engines. Its algorithms are entirely different from those of Google, Yandex, and Bing. However, its unique method of fetching similar photos is its actual strength.
When users upload their search queries to SmallSEOTools.com, it brings similar images from multiple platforms and shows all of them in one place. It actually combines the results of various well-known reverse photo search engines and offers more diversity. Due to this particular reason, it has become quite famous among users.
Sometimes we take a series of pictures to select the best shot, then delete the rest later, but frankly, lots of us keep similar photos and forget about them. As a result, over time we have lots of useless content on our devices.
This method allows you to skim all the photos on your Mac and choose which images to remove and which ones to keep. It does not matter whether you keep all your images in your Pictures folder or if they are spread throughout different folders on your disk.
Find similar photos and drag and drop them to the Trash. You can either press and hold the Command key to select several images, and then drag and drop them to the Trash.
Complete the removal of similar pictures from your Mac by emptying the Trash bin. The manual way of finding similar pics is simple, but can be time-consuming. Decide which method is best for your needs!
Getting rid of similar files is a good way to save storage space on your Mac. We advise regularly clearing your disk space of useless files to maintain your mac and improve the performance of your computer.
Svitlana Shapovalova is a copywriter at Nektony, a software company specializing in developing applications for macOS and iOS. Born and raised in Odesa, graduated from Odesa National University. In her free time, you will find Svitlana at gigs or traveling around the world.
Next, you have to choose whether you want to scan for exact duplicates or similar ones. Exact duplicates are pictures that match each other bit by bit, pixel by pixel. Similar images are those images which even the naked eye can detect to closely resemble each other, but not close enough to be classified as exact duplicates.
The Included Extensions tab shows the image types that will be scanned in both the Exact Match as well as Similar Match scenarios. Please note that as of now, raw images can only be scanned in the Exact Match mode of the duplicate photo finder for Windows 11.
When the scan is over, all the duplicates/ similar images will be listed out in a group format. The important point to note over here is that each group comprises of the same/ similar (as the case may be) kind of images corresponding to a single image. You can click any image and the Preview Area will bring up its preview and also provide useful metadata information about the image.
PictureEcho provides a special scan mode for helping users scan their Adobe Lightroom catalog for exact/similar photos. The procedure is almost entirely the same as the system scan, except the beginning.
In the menu, select File / Find duplicate. Drag and drop image files do the duplicates window. You can drop directories to add their contents recursively. For visual comparison of images, there are specific, non-default options on a drop-down menu. The "custom" level of similarity allows restricting pairings only to the highest degree of similarity, but it has to be set on Preferences as 99. Even then, it does not work perfectly at least for some kinds of images, like line-art. It unfortunately does not provide an automatic selection mechanism with rational criteria, such as resolution, date or whatever, the automatic selection seems to just randomly just pick the first image found as the reference to preserve. Deleting many images can be extremely slow, as it tries to update the result count at every delete.
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