Any tips on speeding up finding duplicate images?

[Soeroah]

I've been using this software for about two years now, and over time my documents folder has been ballooning out somewhat. I tend to add metadata to files to make things more searchable, so when I use Duplicate Cleaner I make sure I'm scanning those, too, because I want to make sure even if a 'new' image is actually a copy of one I already have stored, I want to make sure whichever one I keep is a) the highest quality version and b) has the most up-to-date, useful metadata/comments for added searchability.

I tend to end up running the software multiple times a week, but at this stage it's taking close to or in excess of an hour to run each time. There's a virtual folder function, but it doesn't work for Image Mode searching, so it's essentially useless for my purposes - I've tried doing a search using general and it's not as reliable, unfortunately.

I've taken to making a second copy of my folders that removes a number of items I don't think I need to be scanned with great frequency, to scan against that and try to reduce my scan times, but I was wondering if there are any other tips I could use on speeding up the scan without sacrificing reliability.

Thanks.


Edit: Also, my windows index randomly reset itself shortly before I started running this scan - does that also affect the image metrics caching? This scan taking this much longer than I'm used to would make sense if the DP caching somehow reset - I swear this took about 15 minutes the other day, but it's going to be over an hour today.

[DigitalVolcano]

Which bit of the scan is slow? The image metrics are cached, but the metadata is not currently. People have said the metadata gathering part of the scan can be slow, which is why we're aiming to add metadata caching to a future update.
Moving/copying your files to a new location and scanning that will be slower as the caches are only valid when a file is in the same location as before.

The Windows indexing shouldn't affect the caching.