How to Find Duplicate Images on Your Windows PC

Using a small, free and quite frankly amazing little App, you can scan your Windows computer for identical and even similar images and have all the results displayed in a nice and organized table.

Start out by heading over to the download page for Find.Same.Images.OK (what a fantastically weird name for an App) and save the installer file to your Downloads folder. Ready?

1. Double-click the installer file to start. There are a number of options you can choose from when you install Find.Same.Images.OK. One that you may want to change is the number of places you can launch it from – you probably don’t need the Desktop, Start Menu and Quick-Launch bar – but it is of course entirely up to you. When you’ve made your selections (if any) – click the Install button.
2. If Find.Same.Images.OK doesn’t automatically launch after it’s installed, open it now. Don’t be too overwhelmed by the slew of sections, options, buttons etc – it’s quite straightforward to use.


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3. Now it’s time to tell the App where it can find the images you want to compare. This can be ‘just one’ folder, a series of folders, or your entire hard drive. Locate the “…” button (the one with three dots, found on the right side of the window, just below the middle) and give it a click.
4. Navigate to the folder (or first of several) that contains your images, select it and then click the OK button. If you want the App to search your entire hard drive, select the C: drive itself, and then click OK. The only reason you may want to avoid having Find.Same.Images.OK search your entire drive is that it will also search the Windows system and program folders, which do contain a lot of images – icon files, wallpapers & background images etc. Of course you can just ignore those results, but they will probably just be a nuisance.
5. To select additional folders for Find.Same.Images.OK to look through, click the “..+” button – it’s the one right next to the “…” button you clicked back in step #3. Repeat this process until you’ve selected all of the folders on your drive that contain images you want to have analyzed and compared.
6. Now it’s time to decide exactly how in depth you want the App to go. From the Signature Rules menu, review the options. If you want a balance of performance and quality – select Performance & Quality Balance. If you want the scan to take less time, select Performance Balance – although there may be more ‘false positives’ as the scan itself won’t be quite as “in depth”. If you want the comparisons to be more in depth – which will take a bit longer, select Quality Balance. From my experience, the default option of Performance & Quality Balance is quite good – I’ve yet to find an outright false-positive result, and the time it takes for the entire process to complete isn’t that long at all.
7. There are a series of additional options after Signature Rules for you to consider. The first is if you want the App to look for images that are the same except one has been rotated. Select Rotated Image and choose Yes or No from the pull-down list. Repeat this with each of the other options – Flipped Image and Negative Image
8. When you’re ready, click the Start button to begin.
9. The first part of the process is for Find.Same.Images.OK to scan the folders you selected for images and build a list. Unless you have tens and tens of thousands of images, this part shouldn’t take very long at all.
10. The second part of the process is for Find.Same.Images.OK to create a ‘signature’ for each of the images it found. This part will take a bit longer, but the App is really quite good at ‘guessing’ how long it’ll take – the timer is displayed within the App listed as the time Remaining:
11. The third and final part of the process is for Find.Same.Images.OK to start comparing all those signatures to each other. Again, this part will take a bit longer – depending on how many images are being compared, the speed of your PC etc.
12. Once completed, the App will display a list with all of the duplicate images it found. Each row in the table represents one instance of a pair of duplicate images it found.


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13. As illustrated in the screenshot below (which you’ll almost certainly need to click/enlarge to view properly) the first pair of images it found are exactly identical. They share the same dimensions, file size, etc – the only difference is that the files are named differently.


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14. As illustrated in the screenshot below, another pair of images that the App found appear to be identical. The difference between the two is that they are different sizes – otherwise they’re the same image. Since Find.Same.Images.OK wasn’t absolutely positive the images were the same, it gave the Similarity a 99% rating instead of 100%.


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15. In this last example, Find.Same.Images.OK discovered a pair of images that it believes are the same (or similar). The images are the same size, brightness, etc. However, with a bit closer inspection you can see that one has a small bit of text that the other doesn’t, and the ‘clock’ in the screenshots has a different time. Again, since the App wasn’t positive the pair were an identical match it gave them a 99% Similarity


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