Renee, To my mind it is good practice to periodically reconcile the number of media files stored in my Windows media folder with the number of media items reported by RM. At first I had a larger number recorded in the RM Properties List than I had actual media files, but with the help of thejerrybryan I have finally managed to locate a number of media files that were linked into my database more than once. (see recent topic Media Files - How Many?). It was a bit of a tedious task to visually search through the main media list looking for file names that appear more than once. This seems to be the only way to find, and remove any unwanted duplicates. Would it be possible please to have a new Tool in RM that the user could run to identify these duplicates; we could then decide what to do with them? Thank you.
It would also be helpful to change the behavior of Add New Media to mimic the behavior of Drop New Media in that duplicate media links would not be created in the first place. However, making this change would not eliminate the need for the new tool requested by steve.turner. That is because your RM database could already duplicate media links that need to be identified and eliminated.
Presumably, there would need to be changes made to other facilities that might result in duplicate media, as well, such as Drag-n-Drop from other databases and GEDCOM import.
That’s an excellent observation!
Another complication is that you could have a duplicate file name and a different folder path. I haven’t yet tested RM’s own Drop New Media tool to see how it handles the situation with a duplicate file name and a different folder path.
Also, there is the whole issue with media files and TreeShare. Hopefully, downloading media files that originate in Ancestry and come down to RM with meaningless file names don’t get duplicated. But I have no experience with testing that. Even more interesting is what happens if you have meaningful file names you enter into RM yourself, upload to Ancestry with TreeShare, and then bring back down into RM with TreeShare. Again, I have no experience with testing that.
yes or is/are the file types also considered ? and maybe other scenarios
On a side note – I found that fix media tool created duplicates (Bottom line was the fix made things worse as the some had no tag but the other did) – not sure what the root cause was but I replicate the issue several times (exact same result from a back file). This scenario was when I changed to a subfolder from one main folder.
You may want to check out my utility- TestExternalFiles
It does all of the checks you mentioned.
With Drag n Drop if the media was previously added it will reuse it. With the condition that they have the identical pathname. If the media is in a different folder it will add a new copy. If you select to add media via link it will always add it as new media and not reuse what is identical. The challenge with media is filenames can be identical but be different images. Searching for duplicates by filename will not always give good results.
In other words, it is working as designed and the design is not going to change.
It seems to me that media having the same file name and being in a different folder is a totally different issue. It’s hard to know what to do about that one, and what RM is doing is probably as good as any.
The only reason I can think of for having two links to the same file in the same folder is to be able to have different captions. But I seriously doubt that is why it’s happening in practice. I suspect it’s happening in practice due to user error. If the design is not going to change, perhaps there could be a warning when the duplicates are being created. Or perhaps there could be easier ways to find the duplicates. And perhaps there could be an easy way to merge the duplicates, especially if the captions were also the same.
I can’t speak to what can and cannot be changed, but I have reported enhancement requests to development.