Can I trust it to not delete the original?

thingtwo

I do not trust it. It sent both original and copies to the recycle bin. I restored everything because I do not trust the software. So far it is not helpful. Has anyone LOST photos because the software didn’t work? I also noticed duplicates that it did not identify.

thingtwo

This software is useless. I will seek a refund

Andrey

thingtwo Sure, we don’t want your money if you don’t trust the application. Please go ahead and request refund in the store where you bought it. However, if all you wanted was to delete duplicate photos, you did not have to buy the application in the first place. This feature is available the free version as well.

However, I am afraid I did not catch the reason for the lack of trust. It would be great if you would share what exactly you did, step by step, and what made you to lose your trust. Is there a chance that it was not clear enough how this function works? I would suggest to watch this video that explains this function:

KevinG

I have 80,000 plus photos, great program but as expected takes time to process faces, if you select delete and confirm on next screen, what do you expect it to do but delete the photo(s) you selected

thingtwo

First, yes my desire is to eliminate duplicates. The organization side probably works okay, but I’m not there yet.

I did not delete anything on my own outside of letting the software delete the “duplicates” it “identified” - after reviewing the recycle bin I found originals. Outside of the recycle bin I found duplicates that were not correctly identified.

Over the years I foolishly kept making new folders to backup into creating multiple copies of many images. My laptop is running slow as it does not have enough free space to process well. The software took over 200 hours (1 week) to index everything so that has added too my frustration. After I restored the 18,000+ images it wants another 60 hours to update things.

There are over 200,000 images on the drive so I made one heck of a mess over the past decade plus. I will watch the video, but I do not feel that I am doing it wrong as there aren’t many options. The lack of trust goes back to what I said about the recycle bin contents.

I am now back to where I was, manually deleting duplicates, which has squashed my hope in fixing this problem. If I can get past this step I will scan again to see if this was a good buy or not. Not too worried about the $40, but I was expecting more.

If I am successful and find a use for the program I will let you know.

Andrey

thingtwo Thank you for sharing. Here’s few comments and questions, if you don’t mind:

Most likely you did not disable face recognition during scanning, that is why it took so long. If organizing photos was not your intetion, then there was no point in enabling face recognition. If you would turn it off, initial indexing would be much faster.
You mention that program deleted “original” while leaving “copies”. Can you please explain it a bit more? Program only identifies exact duplicates, those files are identical, therefore what is original and what is copy is actually wery subjective thing. How exactly program should know what you consider original? Program offers you pretty straightforward way to chose what to deletea and what to keep based on top-level folders, as explained in the video. So if program deleted anything, it did it because users told it so.

However, apart from “Delete duplicates” function that works based on top-level folders, this is by far not the only tool in the program that would help you clean up your archive. Another one, quite popular is import: https://community.tonfotos.com/d/175-version-143-simplification-of-copying-files-to-archive Using this approach you can move all you photos to new folder, structure it into logical structure by year/date, while deleting duplicates at the same time.

Also, for more complicates cases, when there is not possible to automatically delete duplicates just based on simple rule like top level folder and you have to manually pick and chose which one to keep, based on folder names and so on, you can use use filter by “Duplicates” album. It will display you your duplicates based on events, which make it much easer to go thru. https://community.tonfotos.com/d/309-190-filters-for-searching-photos-using-complex-queries

Also, to simplify your cherry-picking, there is another very handy tool - context menu comand “remove all duplicates of selected files”. It is very useful when you know which copies you want to keep, then you select those copies and with one click remove every copy elsewhere.

To sum this up, Tonfotos is packed with features that help you organize your archive and specifically deal with duplicates. However, the problem of duplicates is naturally complicated enough so there can be no magic button “make it right”. SImple because everyone understands differently what “right” can mean. And in many cases this still requires some work from user. However, Tonfotos offers lots of tools to simplify this effort. Starting from completely automated like “Delete duplicates” and “Import”, which are great, but not sutuable to every situations. And ending with tools that can help you track down every single duplicate manually and decice what you want to do with it.

Hope this makes sense.