15-Minute Reviews :: Image Comparer v3.0b702

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s review is on Image Comparer version 3.0 build 702 by Bolide Software – An application to find similar photos for aiding in choosing the best quality shots.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Image Comparer analyzes your digital images and automatically selects the best shot out of the many duplicates, allowing you to move or delete duplicate images in a couple of mouse clicks. Image Comparer uses content based image search also known as content based image retrieval.

Unlike similar products, Image Comparer does not just look for exact duplicates. Instead, it analyzes and recognizes an image’s content, and groups pictures that look alike. You can specify the level of visual similarity that is sufficient to consider pictures to be duplicates. View them in pairs or see the top ten similar images and keep the best one!

Image Comparer is extremely useful to professional photographers, designers, and webmasters, who have ‘image-heavy’ sites to maintain. The program is incredibly fast; after a minute or two one can see how many duplicate images are stored and how much disk space will be saved by removing the duplicates. The ‘dupes’ can then be removed all at once with one click. Alternatively, a user can specify which images need to be deleted, moved or copied.

The list of supported image file formats includes RAW, JPEG, J2K, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF, TGA and other.”

Quick Pros

• Application and interface relatively simple
• Ability to compare as a whole and as two groups
• Can save the processed gallery for quick compares later
• Processes surprisingly quick
• Supports all common camera format types
• Results for the most part are surprisingly accurate

Quick Cons

• Wizard should allow for adjustment of threshhold on Step 3
• Did not find one pair of images I would have considered extremely similar, even at 70 percent
• Some identical images showed up as 99 percent even though only difference was filename
• ‘Shows supposed better image’ function seems to be guessing game
• Would be intriguing to show you by ‘grouping’ as well

Expansion

When you first launch the application, you are greeted by a wizard interface. The wizard interface is fairly straightforward; Choose whether you want to compare all the files together (Among one image group), or compare one grouping against another (Between two image groups). The first option is great for processing a first set of photos and want to compare them all; The second option is handy for when you have already taken images of an event, landscape and so forth, processed them and then would like to process more images against the original group. The next step (or steps if you chose Between two image groups) allows you to choose which folders the images reside. On the next step, you choose whether you want to compare similar or find exact duplicates; This step does need to allow you to adjust the threshold right here, instead of having you go into the settings each time to adjust the setting. Finally, the last step asks you where you’d like to save the results and then Process. The best part of this whole process is that you can save the galleries for later comparison; Handy if you know you are planning on taking more photos at a later time of the same event, or if you want to process images as you recieve them from an event (For a photographer’s assistant for example.)

When you’ve gone this far, the application then brings up the processing window. As since this is going to be a very CPU- and hard drive-intense process, the application has even included a Pause and Stop button, as well as a process priority selector, very handy for those who want to continue working on something else while a large collection is processed. I was surprised at how fast the application works; It only took a few moments to rattle through 1183 photos for adding them to the gallery, and then even less time to actually compare them all. I’m not sure on the algorithm for comparing, though I do suspect that the speed may decrease as the photo count goes up, but even at 1183 images I was still surprised at its speed of a few seconds for the compare process. Once this step is done, you are greeted by the main interface with two tabs; One is a full list of all the images, with a preview pane to the right, and further right showing you the top 10 similar images for each image. The second tab shows you all the image pairs available and allows you to pick and choose which you’d like to get rid of. Both interfaces are very easy to use with right-click and keyboard functionality. On the Image pairs tab especially, I found it was as easy as using the scroll wheel and then right-click->Mark the image I didn’t want.

The one thing that did surprise me about this application is that it supports all the common (and uncommon) filetypes typical to digital cameras; The predominant one being the RAW format. While my personal camera does not take RAW format, the DSLR available at my workplace does and would be very handy to use in conjunction with this application.

While at first I was a bit skeptical about the capabilities of this application being able to ‘compare’ images, but I was quickly relieved when I saw just how many images were compared rather accurately. It found all save one pair that I would have concidered similar (and even found a few that I likely would have overlooked as well due to different timeframes) and only had a few small issues crop up. The one oddity I did have arise is that I have one pair of photos of a single flower with two slightly different exposures. They are visually similar (quite so actually, same angle, same coloring, same framing, only one was slightly brighter) and for some reason wouldn’t detect it at 85 percent. I even tried turning the threshold down to 70 percent, and still would not detect this image pair. I assume it should have picked it up, because the application picked up another similar image of nature with a lot more detail and a brightness difference and even framed differently, and it detected that one at 94 percent. The other discrepancy I found was that I do have duplicates in my collection due to the method in which I sort my images; Most of these duplicates did appear as 100 percent. However, for some odd reason, 12 image pairs showed as 99 percent, even though they had never been physically adjusted and their only difference is in file name.

I do need to point out the little helper arrow on the Image pairs tab that seems to point randomly. This is the ‘Shows supposed better image’ arrow, and points to which image the application thinks is better. While this is a great concept and all, I’ve not quite figured out the logic behind it. I’ve seen it point at blurrier images, images where there is discoloration on the edges, images with a thumb in the way, and many others I would have never chosen over the other in the pair. It does almost seem totally random; While it does seem to choose the wrongs often, I would say that it isn’t a 50/50 chance – It’s more like 70/30, that it is still picking some well, but seems too random to be truly relied on.

While the pairing and the Top 10 feature is great, the one aspect of this application that would make this a killer must-have application is instead of grouping images in pairs, where you’re flipping between 4 or 5 different sets of pairs of the same shot, that there would be another tab on which you could see ‘groups’ of similar images, and be able to compare a group of images that are all interlinked somehow. I know this may be more complex, but it would be a lot easier for not only detecting similar groupings, but also to ensure you don’t accidentally delete all the photos from one shot type.

Final Verdict

All-in-all, while the application does seem to need its algorithms improved a bit, they are not too bad and it does actually do quite well. This application may be useful to join the professional photographer’s toolkit. For free, this application would be a good addition for anyone who does a lot of personal photography and wants to chip away at their photography bloat. As for paying $29.95 for this title, if you plan on using it, this would be a great title for anyone adding it to their collection and hopefully the developer continues expanding on the algorythms.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, October 11, 2007