I find two PC applications to be indispensable for my art collection--a screen saver and a dupe finder.
"Screen saver" is a bit of a misnomer these days. In the early days of computing, users like yours truly relied upon CRT monitors, which were vulnerable to image "burn-in" if the display remained unchanged over a weekend. After burn-in, a ghost of the image lingered until the monitor was replaced. A wise programmer invented the screen saver to draw fresh new graphics on the display after a predetermined period of inactivity, a technique which avoided the dread burn-in by changing each of the pixels at a regular interval.
These days, people use screen savers not to protect their LCD monitors, but for the sake of appearance and beauty. Screen savers have achieved a high level of artistry. However, I prefer a screen saver that displays art by actual artists, like the type one finds in a museum. I do not care for special effects. All I want is art. Show me a masterpiece for 45 seconds, then zip to the next one without any fuss. Nothing is better for a party than a fully automated art show.
Duplicate images are not much of a problem in the early stages of an art collection. But when one's collection exceeds a thousand pictures, dupe creep rears its ugly head. Some may argue that the occasional duplicate is a trivial concern, because today's hard drives are vast, and images consume little space. That much is true. Duplicate images are a problem when one uses a screen saver to display the art collection. Dupes cause certain images to appear more often than others.
ACDSee, my current image viewer of choice, has a dupe-finding tool that I have used for many years. However, it only detects exact matches, not similar images. If a nerd has added a frame to a picture, altered the resolution by one pixel, inserted annoying text into the picture (or EXIF info to a JPEG), then such a dupe is no longer an exact match, but merely similar, which poses a problem for those of us who obtain art through the web. Also, I do not wish to retain lower resolution versions of similar images. I only want to keep the best-looking version or else the one with the most descriptive title. If someone has affixed their web site url onto a picture, like a barbarian, then that will be the version I discard.
The most common transgression of geeks who do not understand the meaning or purpose of art is to insert annoying text into a painting. The JPEG format was designed with a view toward eliminating that vice. The EXIF portion of a JPEG permits the insertion of many different fields of text. EXIF data is hidden from the casual observer, but readable by any image viewer worth its salt. One of the reasons I went hunting for a good dupe finder was to locate duplicates of otherwise good pictures that have been marred by someone who did not bother to use EXIF. These go directly to the trashcan.
I required a utility that detects similar images, and after much searching, I finally found a suitable solution in Dup Detector 3.0, a fine old piece of freeware made in 2002 by Prismatic Software. It required the better part of a night to analyze a large library of art, but when I woke up in the morning, almost all the work was done. In a directory of 15,000 pictures, it nailed 286 similar (not identical) images that ACDSee failed to find. However, it is prone to crashing under Windows XP SP3.
As for screen savers, I prefer Gphotoshow. It is true that my image viewer, ACDSee, has a built-in screen saver. However, like many of ACDSee's tools, it is inferior to a stand-alone product. In addition, my version of ACDSee tends to crash at random moments. Eventually, I plan to switch over to Irfanview, which may prove to be a more stable product.
The problem with ACDSee's screen saver is that it requires that photos be added inside the ACDSee utility. Adding a collection of over a thousand images causes an almighty hiccup. The dreaded hourglass appears and does not go away for quite some time. It is not a once-only procedure. Each time images are added, this function must be performed. That is why I no longer use ACDSee's screen saver. Gphotoshow allows the simple designation of a directory pathname, from which it will select a random image on the fly. The options can be changed through the Windows Control Panel, which is not possible with ACDSee's product. Gphotoshow is everything one could ever want in a screen saver.
ACDSee has always seemed focused upon superficial issues relating to look and feel rather than improving essential utilities. That is why I recommend Irfanview to other users. It may not be better than ACDSee, but then again, it might be, for all I know. I plan to give it a try next time I install a Windows OS.
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