Picasa has a bug in its import function that ignores “Exclude duplicates”. Rather than excluding them, it reimports them but appends “-1” “-2” “-3” etc. to the end of the filename.
As a consequence I’ve got several Gb of duplicate photographs that I want to delete.
Windows 7 search function ignores hyphens. So when I search for “-1” I end up with search results contianing any filename that contains the number “1”, which is most of them.
I have Google Desktop search too, but that also ignores hyphens. Further, even if the search were successful, I can’t delete the files directly from Google Desktop.
I’ve downloaded a couple of dedup freeware apps, but they don’t seem to match uniquefilename.jpg to uniquefilename-1.jpg and uniquefilename-2.jpg even though these are duplicates.
Any way to force Windows search to recognize hyphens? Quote marks don’t seem to have an effect. Thanks!
In case anyone stumbles across this thread in the future, I downloaded CubicExplorer, which does a full character search rather than ignoring hyphens and periods as Windows 7 now does.
Picasa had created more than 100Gb of duplicates. Jeez.
I think you could have pulled it off on the command line. First off, use the CD command to change the current directory to where the files are (which you can copy and past from the top of the explorer window. For example:
CD C:\Users\jjimm\Pictures
The following command would then list all files that have “-1” at the end of the filename and put it in the file filelist.txt.
DIR /B /S “-1.” > filelist.txt
Go through and delete any files from filelist.txt that you don’t want to delete. (NOTEPAD filelist.txt). Then use the following command to delete all the filenames left in filelist.txt:
FOR /F %F in (filelist.txt) DO DEL “%F”
The deletion may take a bit, but it will safely run in the background as long as you don’t start any programs that use the folder or subfolders you are removing files from.
If you want to include other numbers following the hyphen, you can change the DIR command to handle that:
FOR /L %F in (1,1,9) DO DIR /B /S -%F. >> filelist.txt
That will get -1 through -9 into filelist.txt. For higher numbers, you can chance the last digit in the parentheses.
Note that, if you run the DIR command above and then the command directly above, there will be duplicates in filelist.txt.