A few years ago, I wanted to clear out the duplicates I had in my Google Drive. It’s not a trivial task as deleting files with the same filename does not cut it: I receive tons of generated pdf’s with the same filename and when time is short (or when being lazy 😉), I just save it to Google Drive as is. The inevitable consequence is: one day cleanup is needed. 😁
Anyone familiar with linux might think of the ‘fdupes‘ utility: it not simply compares the filename but, according to the manual:
comparing file sizes and MD5 signatures, followed by a byte-by-byte comparison
Excellent. Except, when you have to go through tons of documents and files, it’s not that practical. So, with my 2021 new year’s resolutions still fresh in my head, I persevered and coded a quick gui mashup.
Workflow
- The gui presents a list of all file duplicate groups.
- When you click on a group, you are presented with a list of all duplicates.
- You inspect what the document is about by clicking on the filename, which opens it with the default viewer for this file type.
- You rename one of duplicates to the desired final filename by clicking the ‘Edit’ icon.
- You delete the renaming files using the ‘Trash’ icon.
- The UI prevents you from deleting the last one 😉
Simple, but effective!
Release
I coded this a few years ago, but apparently never got to publishing the code, or even just a blog post. This weekend, I cleaned up the project and added the macOS platform (originally only linux was supported). I feel weird about supporting macOS, but the world is how it is: if you want to publish your app for iOS, you need to buy Apple hardware..
Find the project on github.