comp pic project

[RotBaron]

Hardware & Software forum says used in conjunction with AH, so I guess this goes in O' Club.

I have a job where I need to move approximately 500-600 pics from one drive to thumb/flash drive and then give to client for them to choose which ones they want.

They gave me the old comp, it's a HP media center with XP on it. For some reason it looks like there are several instances of the same picture, complicating this project immensely. That and the fact that I don't have any software to make the transfer go any quicker is appearing to make this a several day headache.

Basically I need to transfer all the pictures without transferring the duplicates.

Any thoughts/suggestions, software (that's not too expensive like $35 or less preferably) that will make this less of a headache?

TIA.

[Meatwad]

Do a file search for the pics using windows explorer (jpeg, gif, etc)

Copy/paste into a new folder, go through the pictures on slideshow and delete all copies. Copy rest onto flash drive

A little time consuming but free

[MrRiplEy[H]]

There are free tools for this like dupefinder on linux.

[RotBaron]

I'll give that software a look.

The problem is I believe they came from a camera that every time it was connected to the comp, it re-sent all of the previous pics + new ones. And it made duplicates with numbered files like 001, 00105...so what I have is 001, 00105, 001035, 0010555, 00104444, etc. are all the same picture. 

[APDrone]

See if you can get Microsoft Office Picture Manager..

Open up the thumbnail view, then just select one of each of the dupes, click file>Export  and copy them off into their own folder.

5-600 pics sound like a lot, but it really won't take you that long. No more than an hour.  I go through a thousand football pics in an hour to select out the good ones.

IF you can't get that office picture manager, try the large icons view  in windows explorer, again, select one of each dupe ( ctrl left-mouse ) then drag to a different folder.  I would suggest copying off the ones you selected on each 10 or so.. 'cause it really sucks when you have 50 selected, then accidentally hit the shift or double click.   Trust me.

[RotBaron]

Thanks Drone I'll see if I can make that work, definitely worth trying.

Thanks to everyone for the responses and input.

Happy New Year.

[Bizman]

If you're using the old XP computer to transfer the pictures to a stick, I recommend not using the copy/paste method. If any of those picture files is corrupted, XP will stop copying immediately and it's not funny trying to figure out where it stopped.

Use the free Unstoppable Copier by Roadkil to copy them, it will report the failures and continue from the next one, allowing you to retry with the failed ones if needed.

I would also copy the entire batch. 500 pictures really isn't that much and if they're going to choose from them anyway, why do the extra work? Duplicates can more easily be sorted out from the final selection.