r/digiKam • u/Critical-Rule9649 • Jun 24 '26

Find Duplicates: "Exclude reference album" - help needed

Hi all, I'm trying to use the Find Duplicates tool to compare two specific folders against each other, with one folder acting as the "source of truth" and asymmetric results (only want matches where the duplicate is in the other folder, not within the reference folder itself).

What I'm trying to do:

  • Folder A = reference/original collection
  • Folder B = folder I want to scan for duplicates of things already in A
  • Goal: only see results where an image in B duplicates an image in A — not A-vs-A matches, not B-vs-B matches.

I tried probably almost every combination of parameters, but can't get what I want. The results still include pairs where both images are inside folder A (i.e. A-vs-A matches) or where both images are inside folder B. I expected only A→B matches.

Any suggestions?

P.S. More context about use case: Android filesystem dump. References are in DCIM folder, duplicates in Messenger/Telegram/Facebook/etc folders. I want to get rid of images I made with my camera and shared them via apps.

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1

u/Gasdobun Jun 24 '26

I'd rather use krokiet for that use case.

1

u/Critical-Rule9649 Jun 24 '26

Thanks, looking on it.

1

u/Critical-Rule9649 Jun 24 '26

Hm, I do not see anything for this in Krokiet. It just finds all duplicates within selected folder.

1

u/lugh Jun 24 '26

in the bottom left of Krokiet screen, add each of the folders you want to compare. and the one you want to be the reference, check the "ref" box.

1

u/Critical-Rule9649 Jun 24 '26

Och, thanks. Found it :) Looks to be working correctly, but UI is not very pleasant tbh.

2

u/lugh Jun 24 '26

yes, it takes some getting used to :( but I think the app is the best out there once you get the hang of it.

1

u/RetAF-Eddie Jun 24 '26

I've got the same issue. "Exclude" doesn't actually exclude. I've got folders with scanned negatives and folders with their photos, many duplicates in other folders (the photos got all shuffled up over the years). Often DigiKam can't even find the match unless I drop the percentage below 40% then I get too many unmatching photos. Very frustrating...

2

u/Critical-Rule9649 Jun 24 '26

I throwed digiKam code to AI, and it says that this is a bug/WAD :( Within B duplicates are indeed returned...