Adding "Find Duplicates" feature to F-Spot

[Alvaro del Castillo <acs openshine com>]

Hi guys!

This is the first time I write to the list so I try to be as polite as
possible in the first steps ;-) (later also, of course).

I have a big album with about 8.000 photos and I plan to export all of
them using F-Spot to my gallery [1] website. F-Spot has imported all the
photos without problems but I have found in the import process some
problems:

1. I have lots of duplicates in my album and I will need to clean them.

2. The export feature from F-Spot to gallery doesn't seems to be rock
solid:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169562#c2

So it is time to try to help. I have seen that the TODO list is very
large, so F-Spot needs a lot of work, but working in 1. and 2. could be
the best way to see if I find enought time and motivation to work in
this great application.

So I am working right now in "1. Finding Duplicates".

The process could be very simple:

- In the Find menu add a new entry "Find Duplicates".

- When the new menu entry is selected I travel trought all the selected
images, or all the images is there isn't a selection, and doing a MD5sum
of the files contents, it is easy to see if two images are the same.

- I plan to present the user all the duplicate images with the original.
All the duplicates will be selected so it is very easy for the user to
remove them if she wants.

Trying to show the group of duplicates images only I have seen that it
is easy to show images that are tagged, or it is easy to use a time
range to show some specific images, but it is not as easy in the first
travel trought to the code to show a specific list of images.

Thinking about the best way to do it maybe creating a new tag
"Duplicate" could be a great and direct way to implent the feature. The
user that wants to find the duplicates images just select the
"Duplicate" tag. I will use also the "Find" menu entry because it is
very natural for the user to go there to find the duplicates.

I plan to find sometime this weekend to finish the implementation so any
ideas about the implementation proposal will be very welcomed.

Thanks guys for the great product you have created!

Cheers

-- Alvaro

[1] http://acs.barrapunto.org/gallery/ (sorry, it is in spanish
language)