Digital Photo Metadata Should Have GUIDs to Simplify Duplicate Detection
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 7/30/2015 1:00:00 AM
It's a pain in the neck sorting through duplicate photos.
If you've got a large library of digital photos, chances are you've got a lot of duplicates. It's easy to understand why. Like most people, whenever your camera or your cell phone starts to run out of space, you dump a copy of the photos in a folder somewhere and start deleting photos from your camera. If you didn't delete them all, there's a good chance you'll end up copying a lot of duplicate photos in yet another folder at a later date.
If this pattern repeats a few times, you'll eventually have multiple versions of many of your photos. Making matters worse, if your friends and family share photos with you, there's a good chance they'll give you the same photos from time to time, adding even more duplicates to your photo library.
If you use a program to organize your photos by date, you'll eventually see the duplicates side by side, but it takes a lot of effort to remove all those duplicates.
There's an easy solution to this... If cameras added a GUID to the metadata in every file.
For those who are unfamiliar with GUIDs, a GUID stands for Guaranteed Unique ID, which is a string of numbers and text generated by a formula that guarantees that no other device will ever generate a duplicate. This means that if the camera or other device stored a GUID in the file photo when the photo was generated, it wold be easy for a program to determine if there was a duplicate version of the file somewhere on your computer.
Taken to the next step, photo editing programs could add additional GUIDs to the file whenever you make changes to the photo, giving you the ability to track every variation of the original photo too. So if you create 5 alternate files based on the original photo, each of the 5 revisions would have the original GUID, plus a second GUID for the revision. Then whenever you search for a photo, you could instantly find the 5 revised versions too.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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