Update: 21 November 2021

Apparently FSLint is not as actively maintained as Czkawka, which continues the same function. I have used it with some success, but still had to do some manual duplicate removal. 100 Days to Offload Post 4

One of my ongoing quests is to get my photo library in decent shape. It is pretty messy. I have many years worth of photos, and what makes it a mess is duplicates. I’m not exactly sure how many, but I know there are times where I imported photos in to my library, and instead of excluding duplicates, the software added a ‘-1’ onto the file name, or some such, and so I have duplicates.

I finally have my library mostly okay on my every day computer, but I have backups on my external drive that I need to comb through to make sure that my library is complete.

I found a groovy tool to help with that project, called FSLint, which scans for duplicates in whatever folder you like. It is still tedious, checking choosing which files to delete, but it seems thorough.

I recently updated to Pop OS, based on Ubuntu 20.04, and there are some problems with software dependencies in FSLint in 20.04. So you can’t simply install FSLint through apt or the software center, as usual. The problem was reported on the bug pages, so I am sure it will be fixed one of of these days. But in the mean time, to install it you can download and install the .deb files for FSLint, and its missing dependencies as listed here:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1233710/where-is-fslint-duplicate-file-finder-for-ubuntu-20-04/1233818#1233818