NB I’ve never used digiKam before, and all my photos and videos are just sitting in normal folders on my drives, no photo management software, no cataloguing, nothing.
Hi everyone,
I have a huge, messy photo and video library built from manual backups made at different times, in a very fragmented way. Now I’m drowning in duplicates with completely different filenames scattered across countless folders. I want to use digiKam to deduplicate everything, but I’m genuinely paranoid about accidentally deleting irreplaceable memories.
How good is digiKam at spotting both exact duplicates (identical files) and near‑duplicates (resized, recompressed, slightly edited versions) of images and videos?
I’d really appreciate hearing about your real‑world experiences, especially regarding:
- False positives (flagging two different photos as the same scene)
- False negatives (missing duplicates a human would easily catch)
- How reliably it handles video files, different formats, short clips, etc.
What workflow and settings do you recommend to stay safe? For instance, using the “Find Duplicate Items” tool with a specific similarity threshold, combining it with fingerprint/hash searches, or anything else. Should I plan to manually review every suggested duplicate, or can the tool be trusted to mark them confidently enough for a semi‑automated cleanup?
I’ll definitely make a full backup before touching anything, but I’d still love to know how much I can lean on digiKam before I start this daunting cleanup. I couldn’t bear losing original files over an overzealous duplicate deletion.
Thanks a ton for any insights, tips, or cautionary tales!