@ 103 Alex, Visual Pony author

Very refreshing to receive developer feedback on our feedback, and to know that it will be put to good use - thanks for that.

Given that you're going to fix the issues with the software, I would appreciate knowing if that means the fixes will be available as updates to those of us that tested the software this time around, or a clean install? Just so's I know whether or not to uninstall.

Why does this program automatically want to mess with your browser and add additional toolbars?

Thank you all for your comments and feedback. I'm reading thoroughly and will do my best to improve VSP accordingly.

As for license key question: I'm not going to disable the key, given to GOTD until next major release. I mean, I'm going to fix crash and performance related issues and this version will still support this key.

The other side, is that, as far as I know, GOTD incorporates some additional copy protection, that behavior is not known for me, so I can not guarantee that it will be possible to register program with that key later.

Thanks,
- Alex, Visual Search Pony author

Further to my comment in #91, I see that Chad #97 was able to check 744 pictures in a folder. My folder contains 733 and gets the Microsoft error at 252 and closes the programme. I have tried running the programme several times without any other software running. I have XP Home SP3. It installed very easily. I really can use this software and hope someone has ideas.

Abigail Rhodes I can find it there, but as I said want a desktop icon.

Tim thanks that did it

78.Just for the sake of testing the software, I ran it on a folder which contained a fair amount of .gif images that I’d converted to .jpg for creating merged images and stored in the same folder. I’d also copied a few of the .jpg images.

Not very impressed with the result. It listed all of the converted .jpg images as duplicates of the .gif images and marked them for deletion. A converted .jpg image file is not exactly a duplicate of the original .gif image!

In spite of the developer’s claim that Visual Search Pony will remove duplicates, and leave all original files as they are, the program actually marked for deletion the original .jpg images from which I’d made copies, and left the copies unmarked.

The program leaves a great deal to be desired. Not recommended I’m afraid.

I try out most (image-) comparator programs.
This one is slow.
Program also crashed after searching for one hour.
You can only add another folder to scan, starting from (My) Computer.

I use Unique Filer: a very old discontinued nagware or buggy bêta. It's quicker, with better results, and better overview (it shows the results full size next to each other) ...but also not perfect.

The program installed easily on a Win XP Pro SP3 system with 2GB of RAM. It did not create a desktop icon, although I checked that option during set-up. However, it is easy to go to the start menu and copy a shortcut to the desktop.

Had it search a folder with over 400 sub-folders, containing nearly 26,000 pics. It found nearly 7,000 duplicates while I used the computer for other tasks. It displayed them in groups with thumbnails to compare, but it does not show the file sizes or resolutions for comparison. The publisher's website shows file resolution, but apparently that's not implemented.

It's a very good program as it is, and it would be terrific if it also showed the file sizes and especially the resolutions for help in deciding which files to delete.

Thumbs up!

Nice program, as another user mentioned if you have a lot of photos it will crash, but works great if not several thousand photos (dunno limit, worked on 744 photos for me and failed on 20k). Interesting thing was on 20k photos it only got to processing photo 202 whereas it finishes with the 744.
I'd be interested in purchasing if it could handle my huge wallpaper library of over 20k photos. If you can get better memory management in it then you'd have a buyer.

Installed fine on my WinXP SP3 computer (except for no desktop icon). I gave it a test set of folders with 1280 files, and it took about an hour to find 82 sets of duplicates. It slows the system down a lot when running - I think the developer should have an option to run it at background priority. It did find many images of different sizes, but I agree that it would be nice to have the image size shown in the list of duplicates, since that's usually key information. The user interface is simple enough, but the distinction between "selected", "checked" and "duplicate" (with different cut/paste icons on the toolbar) was not obvious until I read the help.

Tried this on Windows Vista 64bit Home.

Anytime I changed or added directory beyond the default and hit search, it hung up and gave me a vsp.exe stopped working error.

On the duplicate photos it did find, which were two. Yes they were the "same photo", but they had been changed as in the contrast/color if it's looking based on resolution, it missed that. Of course you can check each one and pick any you want to delete.

It would be nice if this found duplicates other than just photos/video.

Looks a keeper for me, yes a little slow compared to Visipics but does say it can do video. I will leave it running over the Easter hols to test that one out. However I do like the way it chooses the duplicates by comparing the dates of the files using the earliest date as the original - which would seem reasonable. Have managed to move 322 duplicates to new place. Strange that program has no icon in the shortcut?

Wow - I seldom comment on this forum, but I'm really impressed with this software. Picasa has been full of duplicate files and I had no idea how to clean it all up. This program found 391 duplicates and sent all of them to the trash can with one click. The originals still remain. I'm very happy.

I have the same problem as #34. I am using Windows 7 x64 and I have around 500,000 images because I am a web developer and this program crashes about 2 minutes into it's search so I get an error that says vsp.exe has encountered a problem and will close. I have tried reinstalling but it continues to occur.

Seems like a great programme. I have tried running both images and videos and they crash out after a short time with a message from Microsoft "vsp.exe has encountered a problem" and the programme closes. I uninstalled the one downloaded via Firefox, downloaded on IE8 reinstalled but still get the same problem. Have downloaded the latest codecs. Can anyone help? Thanks.

Yes this is a great starting idea as noted above.

One use I would have is deleting intermediate versions. For example, and this is exactly what I do sometimes, I shoot a bunch of pictures and even some videos. Then I enhance the group of photos one way in one program, then another way in another program, then one more way in another program. (Involving, for example, reducing grain, autocorrecting exposure, resizing to a final size - in three different programs. Sometimes something similar for videos too.) Each intermediate step keeps the photos in a new subdirectory. All I need to keep are the true originals and the final versions, because I could always generate other versions from the true originals.

Then sometimes for particular photos, or videos, I do something additional manually for a final corrected version to distribute.

So a setting to keep both oldest and newest file versions (that is, marking intermediate date/time versions for deletion) would be useful, for me.

This may be out of the starting concept of this program but should be trivial to add in some "Advanced Settings" menu.

Downloaded and installed fine on my Windows 32bit machine.

I did a heavy task of all my video files on three drives.
Found 381 duplicates in 183 groups, all fine there
As others mentioned little hard to choose withs one to delete, but..

On issue didn't written by others, when you have many episodes of a tv serie with the same intro, the program recognizes it as duplicate will in fact the the episodes are with great difference, so please be aware not delete to fast.

For sure a keeper for me, thx to Gaotd and VSP.

I couldn't quite make up my mind on this one due to all the comments.
so I installed it a gave it a try. Quick installation, easy registering.
but thats where the fun ended.
No desk top icon but you can take care of that by changing the Icon your self and then sending to desk top. The Interface is basic.
When I ran a search the program "hung" and proceeded to crash.
Four times it done this. not a keeper.
The Idea is good but the execution is flawed.
I will continue to use Iobit Advanced System Care Duplicate file finder for this task.
Thanks but no thanks GOTD

@17 - Start time is the start time no matter which time zone you live in; the zones vary but the start doesn't. The time the GAOTD's "day" changes to the new giveaway "day" is 3am on the East Coast of the USA; it is plus or minus that hour in other time zones. I refreshed my screen and watched the giveaway offering change from the old one to the new one at 3am. There was simply no way for those people who gave positive/negative ratings immediately after the giveaway was posted to have had enough time to have downloaded, installed, and tested the program. ;-)

windows xp sp3 - gives lp5 error. asks at uninstall feedback, but does only turn to website without any posibility to give reaction

Okay... Serious failure with this program.

I created a test folder with 60 files in it. Made a sub folder with 25 of those files copied into to it. So the program should have scanned 85 files and found 25 duplicates. I ensured that the test folder was the only one in the "Duplicate Picture Search" tab, and clicked "Search." It started searching and I stopped it when it reached 10,000 files.

This program is very simple and unsophisticated, with no search criteria options except "folder" (want to exclude subfolders? Add sibling folders? No way). And at least in my case it doesn't even work. Even if it did, $25 would be a ridiculous price for this program.

I will stick with clonespy which is free, and a much more powerful and robust program than this one. Love ya, GAOTD, & appreciate the efforts, but this one's for the recycle bin.

Very odd... I added only my "Pictures" folder to the search window and clicked "Search". It started scanning... and scanning... and scanning... When it got up to over 30,000 files I knew something was wrong and stopped it. Windows>Properties shows that including all the subdirectories there are only 6,900 files under "Pictures."

I don't know what happened, especially since apparently that hasn't happened to others here. I'll keep experimenting. This could be a good supplement to clonespy.

In the meantime I'll continue using clonespy (www.clonespy.com) which has a much more sophisticated search function, but doesn't have thumbnails for visual comparison.

Works well! I love it! It found 59 dupes in a file of 3200 pictures which I had already run a good duplicate remover program on.

#64: "should be able to spot a file that has been “tampered” with, e.g. hidden messages or executable code"

FWIW I wouldn't bet on it... 1) for video it just looks at the beginning. 2) it opens the file to look at it, so if there's a problem, e.g. the .exe icon vulnerability a while back, at that point it may well be too late. 3) as steganography apps show, it's possible to hide something in an image file, replacing image data so that it's nearly impossible to detect.

* * *

#67: "I’d really appreciate it if whoever puts the system requirements could add Windows 2000 if a program actually supports it."

The problem devs run into is that there's a big difference between *works in* & officially supported... Problems in win2k could become a can of worms to help a customer solve when it's no longer supported or updated by Microsoft, & the devs themselves don't likely have a copy running on any of their machines. Please remember that once a dev says it works, from that point on they're responsible for making sure it does.

* * *

#73: "Am I wrong or when one clicks on the negative button it advances one more"

What you see in your browser is a version of the web page as your browser has downloaded it into its cache. Go away & come back, hit refresh, or vote & the page will be updated.

* * *

#74: "but today we got license key written in readme.txt, which gives me hope that it’s lifetime :)"

As the app doesn't seem to phone home, no reason to expect it won't keep working as long as it's installed. OTOH the GOTD setup.exe file will only work today, & there's no guarantee that the app will accept the GOTD key on any other date.

Geeeeeeeezzzzzzz..... why do we always get people who want more file types ? The program is clearly designed to deal with images. Maybe somebody should write a program that just boots the computer takes care of your taxes, browses the web, watches the baby and cooks dinner.. maybe it could even go to the grocery. That way nobody would have to do a darn thing.

Visual Search Pony seems to work OK finding different copies of the same images, but in tests trying to do the same thing for video I had zero success, e.g. it would not detect muxed & de-muxed [with/without audio] mpg2 videos were the same, it didn't match a source mpg2 video with a mpg2 re-encode, would not match an mpg2 video to an AVC re-encode etc... Likewise it would not match .tiff original images with edited/corrected .jpg versions. [Since I didn't see any claims of VFW (Video For Windows) support I did not try it with any of the AVI files I had on hand]. Testing was done both in the usual VMs & my regular win7 ult 64 SP1 install. Since I could see a brief preview as video was parsed, results were not caused by not being able to decode the video.

Visual Search Pony uses Internet Explorer & in 7, monitoring the registry I was surprised to see new entries for Microsoft Outlook 2007 from running today's GOTD... Note that while I have Ofc installed I've never had reason to use let alone fire up Outlook. I also saw some involvement with Microsoft DAO & Search. Install itself uses Inno Setup & besides an uninstall key uses the registry to store license info. The program's folder holds 138 files, 20 folders, ~14 MB, while a folder added to User Application Data or User App Data Roaming [xp/7] stores configuration data. There doesn't appear to be an icon for the app's executable [.exe] -- adding an icon to the desktop during install fails.

Video *fingerprinting* is getting a fair bit of attention nowadays -- you don't expect content owners to manually do a visual search of YouTube do you -- but most software is proprietary rather than free. Analyzing images is more popular & widespread, but the focus is usually on face recognition, so for both media types Visual Search Pony may have hit on a great potential market without tons of competition. There seem to be plenty of research WHite Papers out there, so hopefully the dev can increase accuracy & bear in mind comments from r0lZ [#15]. As far as the early negatives folks were talking about, Visual Search Pony uses some open source code -- reading the EULA it seemed to give credit where due, but maybe some in the open source community don't feel it's enough?... I have no idea personally, but several negatives as soon as the GOTD went live *to me* indicate some sort of a grudge against the dev or GOTD.

I figured out why the negative responses. After you install it, and close the program (it worked fine to this point), it can not be reopened without going back to the web. I decided not to reinstall each time. The menu item points to http://visualsearchpony.com/ each time.

I used this program and it found duplicate images, as expected. However, I wanted to "uncheck all" so that I could change the files to delete without having to go through one by one (there were over 500 duplicates and the program checked those it planned to delete).
So the only real downside I ran into with the program is that I could not uncheck or check multiple files by right clicking or holding down the ctrl or shifts keys, as I do with most file listings. The workaround is probably to search a smaller file.

update on images search

it took 3 hours to scan folder and delete

and it found

47442 duplicates in 7556 groups

and I deleted 39886 items to free up 3.50GB

tried the program and come back with mixed results. I had many program crashes but I think that is because the program has difficulty with some .rar and .zip files pending on whether their name contains unique characters in them.

The program currently also is unable to look at non password protected but compressed .zip files and un parted .rar files

The tool I don't see very useful for full drive searches due to its speed and temperment to crash and its simplistic design doesn't seem to allow me the opportunity to look for files above or below a certain size to eliminate unneeded and excess searching.

This is a neat program. No problem downloading and registering. Just ran a test on a folder of 3220 images and was suprised. 3220 total, found 93 duplicates in 46 groups. This took 20 min. At the moment, I am painstakingly going through 3 drives (total of 3.5 TB) to salvage images that I have created. This program for me is going to be of great value. As far as the DT icon - I know how to make one of those - no problem there. Happy to see more thumbs up now and with good input. With the positive feed back, the developers can only make the product better. Thanks GAOTD and Visual Seach Pony. You made my sorting/finding and purging task a lot easier. Its a keeper. Have a nice day all.

@Ruxiao Ma (#8):
Normally license is valid untill Windows reinstall, as the installer installes the license only in day of giveawya, but today we got license key written in readme.txt, which gives me hope that it's lifetime :)

Am I wrong or when one clicks on the negative button it advances one more. I clicked on it to see what the negatives are with an intent of reading comments. I believe I just put the vote one more in that direction, and if that is the case then perhaps the total tally is misleading?

Good for the price, how can you complain when it's free? It is a bit slow, and not perfectly accurate. Neat idea, but there are better ones out there: duplicatephotofinder, visipics, awesomephotofinder - all do about the same thing. I find that searching for true duplicates is a better alternative, and there are some good programs that do that to, like: CloneKillre, NoClone, DuplicateRemover, and EasyDuplicateFinder (my personal fav). With free you get what you pay for, most times. Thanks GAOTD, I give this a C+.

Wow! SLOW (at the rate it's going it will take hours to scan my 6000 photos). Also, a resource hog. Will re-evaluate after scan completes.

1) re #20,#27: I can't even find an ico in any of the install directories! So, no desktop icon even if checked on install.

2) On aging desktop with 1gb and xp-sp3, nearly totally hogged disk access (even with priority set to low via CProcess.exe), making any other work impossible; and to point of barely being able to call Task Manager to shut down Visual Pony.

Not being able to easily see the exif info or at least file size & date is a non-starter for me. Won't spend the time downloading it but would if / when the developers incorporate this capability.

Installed with no problems other than, as previously reported, the installer doesn't add the desktop icon even when it is requested.

This software works EXACTLY as advertised. I knew I had lots of duplicates after copying my system several times and doing several disk migrations for one reason or another. But it turns out I had more than I realized...Visual Search Pony found 14,698 supported files, analyzed them in somewhat less than 2 hours and allowed me to delete 6,880 of them as duplicates.

As expected, it runs through the pic files really fast when it starts and gets downright sluggish toward the end - but the PC never got bogged down as a result. I'm running win7 ultimate on a dual core system with 3 GB mem.

In my book, VSP is a winner!

Cool little program, but the process is just too slow for me. Especially the video part. I tend to have a lot of high def/high bitrate video content on my computer, and this program chokes on that stuff. It scans maybe realtime, meaning that if you have 10 hours of video, it's gonna take 10 hours to scan.
The program can process 1 image every 1.5 seconds or so. That just seems a little slow to me. My computer is no slouch, either. It was free to me, sure, but they are charging everyone else $25.

The name is a little weird... I wasn't aware ponies were any good at finding things.

Hi,

Appart from it's "cleaning up" function, it may have another use also.
I'm thinking of what is said on http://visualsearchpony.com/content-identification/ ...
Supposing that you have access to the original picture/movie (whatever format it's in), the program should be able to spot a file that has been "tampered" with, e.g. hidden messages or executable code. Of course it would not distinguish between the original and the "fixed" file but it might well point out that there is a difference in content even though you can't see it with the naked eye nor draw conclusions from differences in filesize etc.
So, might it function as an security tool of some sort?.. As it stands it may be a first step...

Greetz,
Pat.

portablefreeware offers "DupDetector".
It also compares actual image content, and detects duplicates. It allows you to specify a threshold for what is considered a duplicate image, then when it presents dupes in pairs, it includes file name, date, and size as well as useful thumbnails. I use it often, and it's excellent. It's portable, and it's free.

We're constantly seeing software here that isn't unique, better, or even as good as other software that costs nothing, apart from a completely voluntary donation if you want.

I appreciate that people want to learn programming by doing, and obviously people like to get paid, but just hoping people buy without doing any research doesn't sound like a business plan. It isn't fair to the buyer, and I'm not convinced it encourages better programming.

Installed and registered on my laptop Win7 (x64) without a problem, other than, as others have indicated, no icon was placed on the desktop although the checkbox to do it was checked. I suspect this is due to no program icon actually in the install package. In going to the installation folder, the icon for the program was from the Win7 icon folder. I sent a shortcut to the desktop then changed the icon to one I found more appropriate. The program was great at finding duplicates, even of the same image where I had enlarged the image and altered the file name. (Technically, they're still dupes.) It did NOT give file sizes for the duplicates as indicated in the online help file. It would be well worth seeing this offered again after a few updates.

Ref. HJB comments; ur right!! Nevertheless ur out of topic. The giveaway offers to eliminate duplicate files, it does not offer to search, catalogue, and preserve the best duplicate file. The program does what it says and not what u wish o need.

When the program works it works very well indeed.

Unfortunately it crashes all too often and has to be closed.

If this issue could be rectified then I think that it will make a useful tool to have.

#52 I agree it failed to create a desktop icon when requested during the install. I am running windows7 64 bit.

also it would be nice if it would compare two folders so that you can delete the older images with out search the whole hard dirve.


example

I have folder in C:/image1
c:/users/username/image1
c:/images/image1


etc....

In general I find there are quite a few tecno-psychos on the thumbs down votes. To take a more balanced decition on whether you download or not based on the opinions, I suggest to multiply the thums up vote porcentaje by 1.6, that will squeeze out most of the tecno-psychos.

I am sure this is very nice software, but unfortunately it is just to slow for me to use it. Based on a rough calculation on slightly over 6000 images, it would take a measurable fraction of my life for this to go through all of these images and find duplicates for me.
(It was completing about 1% every 4 minutes, so, 400 minutes to catalog 6000 files) If there is a duplicate detection phase after reading the files I am not including whatever time that would take either.. stopped before it was 5% scanned and gave up).
I have XP, and a Inspiron 9400 laptop. Yes, I know it's old, but this was really slow.
I have used Thumbsplus with good results in the past. I think I'll stick with that.

When a program gets this many comments, you know something is there. I am definitely trying this one, but you'll never hear the results, as I have a 500 GB drive that crashed and I recovered that has at least 100,000 graphic files on it, and due to the hinky nature of the recover program, I have as many as 5 duplicates of each image, but with a unique numerical name. I've been manually sorting through these for a year now and still have a long way to go - if this program does what it says it does, I'll be a happy camper! But there's no way I can post back feedback with such a large project ahead. Thanks GOTD.

In theory, this is a really good tool for a graphic designer like myself who has several thousand JPEG files, many of them ancient remnants of old projects. If some of the previous positive comments are correct, then it's a keeper... it looks promising, and well worth a try. Thanks, GAOTD.

There is a fundamental defect in this program. It searches based upon appearance factors that are reduced to a signature, and then it compares the signatures. It presents a list of the duplicates, including the file name, file path and last modification date and a thumbnail of the photo. So far so good. It assumes that the photo to keep is the one with the earliest modification date. The remaining duplicates are marked for elimination.

The problems:

1. The help file shows the duplicate list as including resolution for each photo. The list it produced for me did not include resolution or file size. This important basic departure from spec should have been caught before this program was put up on gotd.

2. The list did not include file size.

There are many circumstances under which earliest modification date is not indicative of best quality photo. Depending upon several possibilities, resolution and file size can help you determine which of the duplicates you wish to keep.

Additionally, an "original" photo may have been the subject of a lot of work, cleaning it up or editing its size or contrast, etc. The preference rule adopted by the program does not give you enough information to make judgments as to what ought be kept and what ought be discarded. If only a few duplicates are involved, that is not a problem. However, if you have a large number of files and numerous "duplicates", you have lot of individual comparing to do, and the program does not give you tools that facilitates those comparisons.