Is there free software to find visually similar images on a local hard drive?
Asked 7/17/2011
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2 answers
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I’m looking for free desktop software that can search a local hard drive for visually similar images, ideally on Windows or Linux. My main goal is to group edited/processed versions of a photo with the original, or to find the original from a processed copy. Are there any free tools that do content-based image matching rather than just filename or metadata matching?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
15y ago
2 Answers
11
ImgSeek is an open-source project that claims to do this.
DigiKam is apparently trying to add similar functionality.
Pixcavator is not open source, but there is a 30 day free trial.
If you're the DIY coder type, I wound up writing the DB-end of a system that allows phash similarity queries over a fairly large image corpus (10M+ images) in <10 ms/image.
It's part of a larger image deduplication system, and rather tightly coupled, but it's all online here.
Later Edit:
I wound up writing a custom PostgreSQL indexing extension to push fuzzy-image-searching into the database. It's open source here. It scales up to at least 30 million images without significant issue (I have ~32 million images in my index).
Originally by user2611. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user2611
15y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes. Several community-suggested tools can help with local visual image matching.
Free options mentioned include:
- imgSeek — an open-source project designed for image similarity search.
- VisiPics — commonly used for finding visually similar or duplicate photos by analyzing image content rather than just filenames.
- Duplicate Photo Finder — reported by one user as a free solution that matched this need well.
Other notes:
- digiKam was mentioned as adding similar functionality.
- Pixcavator was mentioned, but only as a trial, so it may not meet your “free” requirement.
For your use case—matching edited versions to originals—tools that use visual/content-based comparison are the right approach, though heavily cropped or dramatically altered edits may be harder to match perfectly. In practice, VisiPics and imgSeek are the clearest free starting points from the answers provided.
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