Yet another file deduplicator.

• About
  • What are the use cases?
  • What is compared?
  • Why not using standard sync tools like meld?
  • Doubts?
• Launch
• Examples
  • Duplicated files
  • Names shuffled
• Documentation
  • Parameters
  • Utils

About

What are the use cases?

• I have downloaded photos and videos from the cloud. Oh, both Google Photos and Youtube shrink the file and changes the format. Moreover, it have shortened the file name to 47 characters and capitalize the extension. So how should I know that I have them all backed up offline?
• My disk is cluttered with several backups and I'd like to be sure these are all just copies.
• I merge data from multiple sources. Some files in the backup might have the former orignal file modification date that I might wish to restore.

What is compared?

• The file name.

Works great when the files keep more or less the same name. (Photos downloaded from Google have its stem shortened to 47 chars but that is enough.) Might ignore case sensitivity.

• The file date.

You can impose the same file mtime, tolerate few hours (to correct timezone confusion) or ignore the date altogether.

Note: we ignore smaller than a second differences.

• The file size, the image hash or the video frame count.

The file must have the same size. Or take advantage of the media magic under the hood which ignores the file size but compares the image or the video inside. It is great whenever you end up with some files converted to a different format.

• The contents?

You may use checksum=True to perform CRC32 check. However for byte-to-byte checking, when the file names might differ or you need to check there is no byte corruption, some other tool might be better way, i.e. jdupes.

Why not using standard sync tools like meld?

These imply the folders have the same structure. Deduplidog is tolerant towards files scattered around.

Doubts?

The program does not write anything to the disk, unless execute=True is set. Feel free to launch it just to inspect the recommended actions. Or set inspect=True to output bash commands you may launch after thorough examining.

Launch

Install with pip install deduplidog.

It works as a standalone program with both CLI and TUI interfaces. Just launch the deduplidog command. Moreover, it works best when imported from a Jupyter Notebook.

Examples

Duplicated files

Let's take a closer look to a use-case.

import logging
from deduplidog import Deduplidog

Deduplidog("/home/user/duplicates", "/media/disk/origs", ignore_date=True, rename=True)

This command produced the following output:

Find files by size, ignoring: date, crc32
Duplicates from the work dir at 'home' would be (if execute were True) renamed (prefixed with ✓).
Number of originals: 38
* /home/user/duplicates/foo.txt
  /media/disk/origs/foo.txt
  🔨home: renamable
  📄media: DATE WARNING + a day 🛟skipped on warning
Affectable: 37/38
Affected size: 56.9 kB
Warnings: 1

We found out all the files in the duplicates folder seem to be useless but one. It's date is earlier than the original one. The life buoy icon would prevent any action. To suppress this, let's turn on set_both_to_older_date. See with full log.

Deduplidog("/home/user/duplicates", "/media/disk/origs",
   ignore_date=True, rename=True, set_both_to_older_date=True, log_level=logging.INFO)

Find files by size, ignoring: date, crc32
Duplicates from the work dir at 'home' would be (if execute were True) renamed (prefixed with ✓).
Original file mtime date might be set backwards to the duplicate file.
Number of originals: 38
* /home/user/duplicates/foo.txt
  /media/disk/origs/foo.txt
  🔨home: renamable
  📄media: redatable 2022-04-28 16:58:56 -> 2020-04-26 16:58:00
* /home/user/duplicates/bar.txt
  /media/disk/origs/bar.txt
  🔨home: renamable
* /home/user/duplicates/third.txt
  /media/disk/origs/third.txt
  🔨home: renamable
  ...
Affectable: 38/38
Affected size: 59.9 kB

You see, the log is at the most brief, yet transparent form. The files to be affected at the work folder are prepended with the 🔨 icon whereas those affected at the original folder uses 📄 icon. We might add execute=True parameter to perform the actions. Or use inspect=True to inspect.

Deduplidog("/home/user/duplicates", "/media/disk/origs",
  ignore_date=True, rename=True, set_both_to_older_date=True, inspect=True)

The inspect=True just produces the commands we might subsequently use.

touch -t 1524754680.0 /media/disk/origs/foo.txt
mv -n /home/user/duplicates/foo.txt /home/user/duplicates/✓foo.txt
mv -n /home/user/duplicates/bar.txt /home/user/duplicates/✓bar.txt
mv -n /home/user/duplicates/third.txt /home/user/duplicates/✓third.txt

Names shuffled

You face a directory that might contain some images twice. Let's analyze. We turn on media_magic so that we find the scaled down images. We ignore_name because the scaled images might have been renamed. We skip_bigger files as we examine the only folder and every file pair would be matched twice. That way, we declare the original image is the bigger one. And we set log_level verbosity so that we get a list of the affected files.

$ deduplidog --work-dir ~/shuffled/ --media-magic --ignore-name --skip-bigger --log-level=20
Only files with media suffixes are taken into consideration. Nor the size nor the date is compared. Nor the name!
Duplicates from the work dir at 'shuffled' (only if smaller than the pair file) would be (if execute were True) left intact (because no action is selected).

Number of originals: 9
Caching image hashes: 100%|███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 9/9 [00:00<00:00, 16.63it/s]
Caching working files: 9it [00:00, 62497.91it/s]
* /home/user/shuffled/IMG_20230802_shrink.jpg
  /home/user/shuffled/IMG_20230802.jpg
Affectable: 1/9
Affected size: 636.4 kB

We see there si a single duplicated file whose name is IMG_20230802_shrink.jpg.

Documentation

Parameters

Import the Deduplidog class and change its parameters.

from deduplidog import Deduplidog

Or change these parameter from CLI or TUI, by launching deduplidog.

Find the duplicates. Normally, the file must have the same size, date and name. (Name might be just similar if parameters like strip_end_counter are set.) If media_magic=True, media files receive different rules: Neither the size nor the date are compared. See its help.

parameter	type	default	description
work_dir	str | Path	-	Folder of the files suspectible to be duplicates.
original_dir	str | Path	-	Folder of the original files. Normally, these files will not be affected. (However, they might get affected by treat_bigger_as_original or set_both_to_older_date).
Actions
execute	bool	False	If False, nothing happens, just a safe run is performed.
inspect	bool	False	Print bash commands that correspond to the actions that would have been executed if execute were True. You can check and run them yourself.
rename	bool	False	If execute=True, prepend ✓ to the duplicated work file name (or possibly to the original file name if treat_bigger_as_original). Mutually exclusive with replace_with_original and delete.
delete	bool	False	If execute=True, delete theduplicated work file name (or possibly to the original file name if treat_bigger_as_original). Mutually exclusive with replace_with_original and rename.
replace_with_original	bool	False	If execute=True, replace duplicated work file with the original (or possibly vice versa if treat_bigger_as_original). Mutually exclusive with rename and delete.
set_both_to_older_date	bool	False	If execute=True, media_magic=True or (media_magic=False and ignore_date=True), both files are set to the older date. Ex: work file get's the original file's date or vice versa.
treat_bigger_as_original	bool	False	If execute=True and rename=True and media_magic=True, the original file might be affected (by renaming) if smaller than the work file.
skip_bigger	bool	False	If media_magic=True, all writing actions, such as rename, replace_with_original, set_both_to_older_date and treat_bigger_as_original are executed only if the affectable file is smaller (or the same size) than the other.
skip_empty	bool	False	Skip files with zero size.
neglect_warning	bool	False	By default, when a file with bigger size or older date should be affected, just warning is generated. Turn this to suppress it.
Matching
casefold	bool	False	Case insensitive file name comparing.
checksum	bool	False	If media_magic=False and ignore_size=False, files will be compared by CRC32 checksum. (This mode is considerably slower.)
tolerate_hour	int | tuple[int, int] | bool	False	When comparing files in work_dir and media_magic=False, tolerate hour difference. Sometimes when dealing with FS changes, files might got shifted few hours. * bool → -1 .. +1 * int → -int .. +int * tuple → int1 .. int2 Ex: tolerate_hour=2 → work_file.st_mtime -7200 ... + 7200 is compared to the original_file.st_mtime
ignore_name	bool	False	Files will not be compared by stem nor suffix.
ignore_date	bool	False	If media_magic=False, files will not be compared by date.
ignore_size	bool	False	If media_magic=False, files will not be compared by size.
space2char	bool | str	False	When comparing files in work_dir, consider space as another char. Ex: "file 012.jpg" is compared as "file_012.jpg"
strip_end_counter	bool	False	When comparing files in work_dir, strip the counter. Ex: "00034(3).MTS" is compared as "00034.MTS"
strip_suffix	str	False	When comparing files in work_dir, strip the file name end matched by a regular. Ex: "001-edited.jpg" is compared as "001.jpg"
work_file_stem_shortened	int	None	Photos downloaded from Google have its stem shortened to 47 chars. For the comparing purpose, treat original folder file names shortened.
invert_selection	bool	False	Match only those files from work_dir that does not match the criterions.
Media
media_magic	bool	False	Nor the size or date is compared for files with media suffixes. A video is considered a duplicate if it has the same name and a similar number of frames, even if it has a different extension. An image is considered a duplicate if it has the same name and a similar image hash, even if the files are of different sizes. (This mode is considerably slower.)
accepted_frame_delta	int	1	Used only when media_magic is True
accepted_img_hash_diff	int	1	Used only when media_magic is True
img_compare_date	bool	False	If True and media_magic=True, the work file date or the work file EXIF date must match the original file date (has to be no more than an hour around).
Helper
log_level	int	30 (warning)	10 debug .. 50 critical
output	bool	False	Stores the output log to a file in the current working directory. (Never overwrites an older file.)

Utils

In the deduplidog.utils packages, you'll find a several handsome tools to help you. You will find parameters by using you IDE hints.

images

urls: Iterable[str | Path] Display a ribbon of images.

print_video_thumbs

src: str | Path Displays thumbnails for a video.

print_videos_thumbs

dir_: Path To quickly understand the content of each video, output the duration and the first few frames.

get_frame_count

filename: str|Path Uses cv2 to determine the video frame count. Method is cached.

search_for_media_wizzard

cwd: str Repeatedly prompt and search for files with similar names somewhere in the specified path. Display all such files as images and video previews.

are_contained

work_dir: str, original_dir: str, sec_range: int = 60 You got two dirs with files having different naming system (427.JPG vs DSC_1344) which you suspect to contain the same set. The same files in the dirs seem to have the same timestamp. The same timestamp means +/- sec_range (ex: 1 minute). Loop all files from work_dir and display corresponding files having the same timestamp. or warn that no original exists.

remove_prefix_in_workdir

work_dir: str Removes the prefix ✓ recursively from all the files. The prefix might have been previously given by the deduplidog.

mark_symlink_by_target

suspicious_directory: str | Path, starting_path: str If the file is a symlink, pointing to this path, rename it with an arrow.

:param suspicious_directory: Ex: /media/user/disk/Takeout/Photos/
:param starting_path: Ex: /media/user/disk

mark_symlink_only_dirs

dir_: str | Path If the directory is full of only symlinks or empty, rename it to an arrow.

mtime_files_in_dir_according_to_json

dir_: str | Path, json_dir: str | Path Google Photos returns JSON with the photo modification time. Sets the photos from the dir_ to the dates fetched from the directory with these JSONs.