Frequently Asked Questions

If you are looking to compare exact duplicates then DuplicateFinder is for you. If your one of those people who take several photos of the same scene, or make edits of the same photo, and your looking to clean up those as well, you should consider our DuplicateFinder/DPF combo pack. DuplicateFinder (DuplicateFinder) DPF (DuplicatePhotoFinder) the great thing about the combo pack, is that it includes our great DuplicateFinder for getting those exact duplicates, including music (we even have a new feature in DuplicateFinder called music tags which will allow locating of similar music files) and, DPF which through advanced searching can match up similar photos which aren't exact duplicates you can then keep the best and erase the ones that aren't as good.

This issue is common among people who manually delete files that have been added to the iTunes library. The files are gone, and yet when you open iTunes the library still lists them. I have located this application that will resolve the problem. I tested it here and it worked fine.

Download here

Download the file unzip, and run the application. You will get a listing of scripts included (some others there might also be quite useful to you at other times) Select the script: itunes_remove_notfound and click on run selected script.

This will delete those entries in the library for any music files that are not on the hard drive where they originally were.

The person who created these scripts suggests that itunes be running when you do this. (then restart after its finished) however it works both ways.

There are a few things that may prevent the activation of the product. 1)UAC (User Account Control) Microsoft's dreaded addon to security. In windows vista and win7 Right click on the program shortcut, and select "Run as administrator" this should bypass problems caused by UAC. Some firewall or anti-virus programs can prevent changes to your computer. Even ones you want to make such as registering your product. one such culprit is "Malwarebytes' Anti-malware" a recent customer reported that he was unable to register his program until he uninstalled the program. You should be able to temporarily disable the anti-virus/malware or firewall program to activate your copy.

DuplicateFinder does not recognize some of the duplicate files. I'm 100% sure they are duplicates.

Some files may be marked with the Temporary attribute. This is usually done by the program that placed the files, or by windows operating system itself. By default DuplicateFinder does not check these file since they are only supposed to be there temporarily. To force DuplicateFinder to see these files and deal with duplicates that are marked temporary, open DuplicateFinder, Click on settings, and uncheck the "skip temporary files" check-box. Now if you run the scan DuplicateFinder will now find these temporary files.

Currently DuplicateFinder is only available in English. I asked the engineers, and their Position is this. The original writer of the program embedded all of the text directly into the program. To support multiple languages they would have to remove all of the text from the program and build language modules. This is a major undertaking and not a high priority. So to summarize, It will probably be quite some time before multi-language support is added.

The answer to this is both Yes, and No. DuplicateFinder was not initially intended to be a network ready app.

Yes it is possible to use the software on network drives. No It may not work as well on network drives.

Some things to understand.

• Use on wireless applications is not recommended. It has been shown that the delay for use over wireless networks builds exponentially the more duplicates it searches for the faster the delay becomes too much for the system to handle until it just freezes.
• Searches over wireless for small groups of files may be slow but will usually will complete if you are only searching a small folder or 2.
• Searches over wired networks will be less effected, but large searches may cause the same results.

Conclusion:

• Wireless Not recommended but possible. small searches should be fine.
• Wired network drives should be better but be careful if your search shows signs of infinite delay kill the process and try a smaller search.
• Engineers are looking into solutions to this issue. If a solution is found the program will be updated.

when logging into the duplicatefinder website to retrieve your license key please keep in mind.

your password is case sensitive. please copy and paste both the login id (your email address) and password directly from your confirmation email for easiest access.

In a few cases scanning some music with blank tags has caused an exception error to occur when scanning for duplicates using Music tags. The cause for this is currently under investigation and should be resolved soon. In the meantime If this occurs to you please check your music files for any songs that do not have tag information (Artist, album, genere bitrate, etc.) and either update the files using a music tag editor, or move the files temporairly to a different folder not included in the scan.

Some music conversion programs are known to create converted music files without tag information. :shock: Consider using an alternate utility.

There are several reasons that you might not be able to use DuplicateFinder on your portable music/video player.

1. Your device may not have a drive letter assigned to it. Check your manual on how to enable MSC (Mass Storage Controler) mode. DuplicateFinder will not work on a folder unless you can access it via a drive letter.
2. Even if you do have a drive letter assigned to the devices memory, the device may have restricted access in order to protect DMR (digital media rights) Bypassing this is beyond the scope of DuplicateFinder.

If you cannot access your device in windows explorer through the drive letter, chances are you will not be able to access the device directly using DuplicateFinder. The suggested method of use in this case is

• Sync the device with your computer.
• Use DuplicateFinder on the synced folders.
• Re-sync the computer back to the music/video player.

If you are having a problem activating your product via the automatic process please follow this procedure

• Verify that you have entered your license key correctly.
• Click on the "Activate by email" link under the activate license button. Send the email.

Note: If you do not have pop3 mail configured and you use webmail (hotmail, yahoo mail or similar email in your web browser) you will not be able to send the email. You should leave the message open, open your browser based email, copy the email details into a new message in your browser email (copy subject to subject, to -> to, and body to body) then send the email message.

Once you receive a reply there should be a 4 line activation code. copy the code onto the clipboard. Open the DuplicateFinder application. The software will read the activation code from the clipboard and activate itself.

Question:

I have two folders, both on the same HDD. I want to compare these two and delete the dups in one one folder. I want to do this using a menu option (not checking every file) but I cant find an option... How do I do this?

Answer:

• Select the folders you want to scan and Add them to the Include area.
• Select the type of file formats you wish to compare (or use a wildcard *.* to search all files).
• Start the scan
• When the results show, click on the PATH column header - this will sort the list by location.
• Click on the first duplicate file you wish to remove in the folder location to mark it. Now scroll down and find the last file you wish to mark - hold down the shift key and click on that file. You'll notice every file between those two 'markers' is now highlighted.
• With all of the files now marked - you can rename, delete or move the files.

Question:

I have a huge collection of Aerosmith songs, I’ve collected hundreds of songs but many are duplicates. Some are live versions; some copies are better than others. I just want one of each. What can I do?

Answer:

The process of organizing these songs manually would be a long and cumbersome task. But with ID Tag comparing in DuplicateFinder it’s fast and simple. The steps are:

1. Set DuplicateFinder into Audio Tag Mode (Compare Music Tags)
2. Set the Music Tags settings to look at the song Title Tags
3. Choose the folders, and drives of where to look for Aerosmith songs
4. Press ‘Start’
5. When the search completes a list of results is produced. This report will show the following characteristics about each song listed: Title, Artist, Album, and Duration. It may also show: Track, Year, Genre and Bit Rate depending on your settings.
6. Each song will belong to a numbered duplicate group allowing you to decide which version to keep – based on the characteristics of the file.
7. That’s all there is to it, you can use this process to view all the song duplicates and select which ones to delete of move off to a different folder.

Tip: you can double-click on any song and it will begin playing in the associated music player on your computer.

Question:

I see there is a new version of DuplicateFinder available... How do I upgrade to it?

Answer:

If you are a registered (licensed) owner the preferred method is to download the upgrade and simply run Setup. It is not necessary to uninstall the program first, in fact if you do uninstall DuplicateFinder before upgrading - you will need to put the license code in again. So the best way is to just upgrade over the existing version.

Question:

I am evaluating this program for our Engineering dept. It seems that searching for duplicates with different file names is inconsistent. For example when I have a Word document that I "Save As" another name and do a search on it...it does not come up as a duplicate. However If I take that same Word file and rename it in Windows Explorer by right clicking on it and selecting "Rename", the duplicate is found. Is this how it should be?

Answer:

Yes, it's a good question! That is how the software is designed to work. Every time you save a file in Word (or in any application) it recreates the file entirely. You can do this a number of times, and although the content will remain the same the files themselves will not be duplicates. However you can take a word doc, make a copy of it and rename it - and these will show up as duplicates. That's because DuplicateFinder searches for duplicates based on their binary content, and renaming a file only changes its label - not the document itself.

Question:

I have many duplicates that DuplicateFinder located on my system and on external drives, many are exact duplicates – the date, size, names are all the same. When I use the AutoSelect tool I choose to select all files and leave only the newest in each duplicate group. If the files are identical, how do you pick which file to leave unchecked?

Answer:

The way the sorting program works is that if it identifies several exact duplicates, it will consider the first file it encountered in each group to be dominant. What you will notice typically is that the top file in a list of duplicates is the file that remains unchecked and won’t be touched. You can always manually change the selections.

Have you ever copied a document to your hard drive, but couldn't remember where you saved it? Have you created a new file with a program and can't figure out where to go when you want to attach it to an email? How about downloading a file from the web with your browser and then not knowing where to go to open it?

If any of these scenarios are familiar to you, then this tech tip should be helpful. We'll start with the simplest methods and work our way to the more complicated.

1. Check the Recent Document Folder
   • In Windows XP, this is named Recent Documents.
   • In Windows Vista/7, this is named Recent Items.
   • Click on the Windows Start Button and scroll up the menu to either Recent Documents or Recent Items. There, you will find the last 15 files that you have opened/saved on your computer.
2. Check the Recently Used List in Your Applications
• Looking for a file that you last used in Microsoft Word? Open Word and click File to see a list of recently used files. With Word 2007, you want to click on the circular "Office" button to display your most recently used files. Typically only the 5-15 most recently used files are listed in applications.
3. Check Your My Documents or Documents Folders
• Microsoft Office applications usually save to those folders by default. If you never have had to specify a new location to save a file, your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files are probably here.
4. Create a Fake File to Save
   • If you weren't able to find your file with the two methods above, then creating a fake file with the application could work. Let's say you know you created the file in Excel, but just don't know where you saved it. Create a new file in Excel and go to Save As; you should see the directory where the files are being saved by default. That should give you a pretty good hint where the file is located. You can also right-click on file to bring up a menu of actions - re-save the file somewhere else, move it, email it, etc...
   • Applications usually remember the last location you saved a file, but often times that last location isn't necessarily where you save every single file. This can be quite frustrating if your folder is in an uncommon location on your hard drive.
   • With most applications you can change the default location where the files are being saved. This option can usually be found within the Options or Preferences menu items.
   • Creating a fake file is particularly helpful for applications that save files to their own obscure default location. I usually try and save these files to my Desktop or to the Documents folder.
5. Use Windows Search to Find the File
   • If none of the easier methods have worked, you can always use the Search function that is built into Windows. This method will help you most quickly if you know the name of the file you are looking for. Even if you don't remember the name, you can probably still find the file by searching by the date you may have last modified it, by a portion of the file name, by the size of the file, or even the document extension of the file. In extreme cases you can also search the contents of every file to match up with what you are looking for. You would only do this if you have absolutely no idea what the file name is or if it was mixed in with a bunch of the same file type.
   • In Windows XP: Click Start, Search, Select All Files and Folders, and then choose search criteria.
   • In Windows Vista/7: Click Start and then in the Start Search field, type what you think the document name is. With indexing turned on, you can also try typing a specific word that might only be in that document. Indexing makes searching the contents of a file nearly instantaneous. If nothing shows up in the search results, click search anywhere to bring up the Advanced Search menu. From there you will be able to search various criteria.
6. Additional Tips
   • The Search function is also a great way to organize your files. If I want to put all my pictures in one folder, I can search the entire drive for files that have the extension .jpg.
   • If I'm cleaning out my hard drive to free up space, I'll start with Search to find the biggest files to delete first. For example, I could search for all files over 5 MB and delete what I don't need.

Question:

I’ve scanned for duplicates, selected all the ones I want to remove but I can’t delete my duplicates! Why?

Answer:

There a number of reasons why you may not be able to delete duplicate files, and it would be impossible to provide a single definitive answer. However we can give you some tips and hints that could lead you to resolving the problem.

1. Verify that you are in ADMIN mode, if you are not – switch to a User account that has admin privileges or upgrade your own account to Admin.
2. The files you are trying to delete are in use by another program. Shut down all other programs with the exception of DuplicateFinder and try again.
3. UAC (User Access Control) is enabled and blocking your request. UAC is found in modern operating systems like Windows 7 and Vista. Try disabling UAC then deleting the files, whether you keep UAC disabled is a choice left up to you. There are many articles on the Internet that discuss how to disable UAC. There is also a free utility that you can download to help automate the process, we do not endorse not support this produc. Use with caution and at your own risk and responsibility: http://tweak-uac.com/home/
4. Compatibility – sometimes when nothing else works try running in XP compatibility mode. There are many articles on the Internet on running in compatibility mode, simply Google the term along with the operation system name you are running with.
5. Lastly a good test to run is to right-click on any file showing in the DuplicateFinder results that you want to delete. Select to “Open the folder containing the file”. This will launch Windows Explorer. Within Windows Explorer attempt to delete the file there, if the deletion fails you most likely have a permissions issue. Contact your system administrator for further assistance

We've posted 2 Video Tutorials on YouTube on how to Find and Resolve Duplicate Photos and Images.

Have a look! Video1, Video2

Question:

Are the Support Ticket and the Forum the same?

Answer:

No they are two separate systems which require different login credentials. All are welcome and encouraged to comment and participate on the forum. However, if you are experiencing technical difficulties with DuplicateFinder and need to contact support, then please use thesupport ticketing system to address the issue.

Question:

Why is there an expiration date on the license?

Answer:

When you purchase a license for DuplicateFinder (DuplicateFinder) you own that license* forever, and we hope you use it as much as possible. However in order to keep the product up to date by adding more features and continually advancing it there is a time limit for getting free updates. The length of your license therefore pertains to the time span within which you can continue to get free updates and free email support.

After your license expires you can continue using the product like you always have - it will continue to work. But you just won't be eligible to receive any new advances in the product. Before your license expires we will notify you and ask if you would like to renew and extend your coverage. It's completely up to you whether to do this or not, either way the product will continue to operate.

*Each computer is assigned a unique license ID, once activated the software will not work on any other computer. In the event you upgrade or change your computer within the license coverage period contact our support department to transfer the license to the new computer.

Question:

The software will not install. I have Online Armor installed on my computer.

Answer:

This reply comes from the makers of online armor and may not be completely clear.

Then you have to check the install mode and allow if the alert popup is displayed. Also you can add the program folder for the software in Online Armor on section Options/Exclusions to the list.

We suggest that if you have any further questions please contact them at www.emsisoft.com

Question:

Are the files that I think are duplicates really duplicates?

Answer:

Many programs make changes if you save the same file again, thus making them not exact duplicates. If you save a word document a few minutes later with a different name, even though they may have the same data, they are not the same. There are a few things that we can try.

1. Are some of the files marked as temporary.
• In settings try this. uncheck the skip temporary files box.
2. Are the photos the same but maybe have different metadata.
• In settings uncheck Include EXIF tags
3. Perform a manual check on suspected duplicates.
   • In settings click the tools tab then CRC calculator. Use this tool to manually compare the two(or more) suspected duplicates for exact match. If the CRC is the same, then they should be duplicates.

This error Cannot load Outlook application, EOleSysError: Class not registered, ClassID: {0006F03A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} Error Code: 80040154 Is an indication that Outlook is not fully installed. This can happen with preinstalled copies of outlook or if a trial version was previously installed. Also sometimes installing outlook separately from the rest of microsoft office can cause this.

If you have installation disks for outlook we suggest reinstalling the software.

We've become aware of an Duplicate Finder registration glitch that some people experience when they update to Windows 10. We've investigated the problem and found a solution. So, if you are planning to update to Windows 10, please follow these steps before you run the update:

1. Open Duplicate Finder and click on "About" in the top right corner
2. Make a note of your registration code, then select "Remove key" and close the program
3. Update your operating system to Windows 10
4. Open Duplicate Finder again and click on the "Register Now" button
5. Close the Web page that opens (you don't need that page because you already have your license code)
6. Enter your license code and the e-mail address you used to register in a pop-up window that appears
7. Click "Activate" and continue to enjoy Duplicate Finder