Need some help on understanding the grouping

[dcwul62]

I am trying to figure out the method Duplicate Cleaner (v5) is grouping files.

As an example, after running DC I have groups with 4, 6 upto over 16 files.
a group of 4 files, usually have 2 'sets/combinations' of 2 identical files in different folders.

so in case of 16 files per group, I have 8 'sets' of 2 identical files, with same size date-time stamp.
Instead of having 1 group, I would expect 8 groups each containing 2 (or more) identical files.

Below example - I would expect 8 groups.

Question: is this a matter of 'settings' with DC ?

Thanks.

[DigitalVolcano]

It's possibly criteria/folder settings and depends on the mode, etc. Post the last scan of your log file - that'll show the settings.

[dcwul62]

Is it this?

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1/16/2022 10:11:12 AM
Scanning
- Image mode: Ignore
- Same aspect ratio
- Find rotated
- Find flipped
- Image tags: Description - Exact match
- All file types

Folders to search:
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-18\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-17\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-16\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-15\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-14\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-13\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-12\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photos\Canon\2005-09-11\ [Find duplicates-Yes]
N:\Photo Projects\description folders removed for privacy reason\2005\ [Find duplicates-Yes]

1/16/2022 10:11:16 AM
Scan complete
Total time taken:00:00:03
1,518 file(s) scanned in 21 folder(s) (2.27 GB)
85 group(s) of duplicates
555 file(s) have duplicates (875 MB)

--

[DigitalVolcano]

You are only matching on the 'Description' text, not the actual image itself. Is this correct? If you scroll across the results the 'Description' column should be same in each group as that is what you are asking it to match by.

[dcwul62]

I don't know... I wanted to compare files with description or comments, so I added those, so any file that has no such thing, would then be skipped.

I just check, but same file size is greyed out.

No idea how to proceed... sorry.

[DigitalVolcano]

Why don't you set Image Similarity to 'Good' so it is also matching by the Image?

[dcwul62]

Frankly, I don't know what best to do, reason why I asked here...

Please note, in most cases (almost always) I use DC with default settings.
This is one of the rare occasions I go into settings.

Anyway, many thanks for the tip!

With 'Good Match' I still get quite a few groups with 4 files.
Using 'Exact Match' gets me the desired results : groups with 2 files per group, or sometimes 3 in case of exact duplicates.

It is a bit slower, but okay.

Thanks again!