Applications :: Automator - How To Remove Duplicate Files
Jan 3, 2011
Unlike Windows, this damn-ded MacOS X won't ask what to do when moving several items with the same name to a single location. In Vista and 7, it asks if you want to replace all similarly named items with a single of the items or if you want to put all of the similarly named items in the new location and append an annotation at the end of the file name. (I think Windows appends "Copy #" to duplicates) So, I'm left with, "File, File 2, File 3, file 4" in a single folder. I need an Automator action to sort this out and simply move or delete the duplicates.
The simplest action I can think is: Ask for files>get files>select files with similar filenames, neglecting the last characters if they are numerals>reference the size (with accuracy of 1 byte) of selected files>label files of the same size red>select red files>move red files to a selected folder. How can I get these sort of tools? I need a measuring action and another action that will compare file names...
Im new to the Mac operating system. I am proficient on a PC, but Macs have always captivated my attention. I finally gave into the Macbook. Anyways ---
The Automator application seems phenomenal in theory I just haven't learned all the ins and outs yet, but i see the concept that it was designed for (Jobs = Genius). Long story short I was streaming all of my music over from my PC and it got interrupted twice. I kept streaming to the same folder but it never prompted me to replace existing files of the same name. So I figured it would do it automatically. To my dismay that wasn't the case at all. I now have 9,000 songs and at least 4,000 of which are duplicates/Triplets. I wanted to know if there was some way to streamline the process of deleting and purging all these files out of my Music Folder/Itunes Library, Via the Automator program or any other program you know of.
I would like to remove duplicate files that are on my computer and I believe that there is an application for this? Also, I want to remove Parallels desktop and all its associated files and programs. Basically, I am cleaning up so I can add photos and music. I want to make sure that when a program is removed all it "hidden" files are also removed.
I've been fooling around with Automator for a few hours trying to look for little ways it can handle my repetitive stuff. I've figured out some pretty neat tricks, but I also have a slew of unwanted folder actions and services in my context menus and for the life of my I can't figure out how to get rid of them. The folder actions are especially problematic since they mess with my files automatically. Googling it isn't turning up anything nor can I seem to find anything in Apple's help documents. Is this some kind of huge joke being played on me here or something? Has no one ever wanted to disable their automator tasks before or something?
I am going to manually remove each duplicate, but my ? is when you click on show duplicates...is that every copy of that song in itunes or is there still another copy that isn't showing when you select this?
I'm attempting to use Automator to rename picture files. I select "Make Sequential" and put the name in that I want. However, once everything is completed my pictures are not in the same order they were out of the camera. I like how my camera imports the photos in the order that I took them. Now when I look through my pictures my vacation is completely out of chronological order. How do can I set Automator so that this does not happen in the future?
Is it possible to write a workflow that can select files that are contained inside a folder package?
I am trying to automate a file copy of VMWare fusion 3 files to a windows machine on the network but I cannot seem to get any of the finder actions to give me an option to get inside the package.
I'm new to the Mac world but have been successful in creating a few Automator workflows to simplify certain tasks. However, I'm stuck on the flowing; I'd like to create a workflow that searches a particular folder for items created 30 days before today's date and the delete them. I'm assuming I need to create a variable of today's date and then subtract 30 days from it and so on. Haven't been able to figure this out.
I have a collection of .htm files saved onto my Mac hard drive. I want to convert them to .jpg files--all at once. I found a Windows program that could do it, but when it converted them, it would not retain the original file names. It gave them a sequential file name, i.e. _1.jpg, _2.jpg, _3.jpg ~ _263.jpg. There is no option to retain the original file names...:/
So my question is, is there an Automator process that could batch convert .htm files to .jpg? Or is there an app for Mac that can batch convert .htm files to image (.jpg) files?
I usually am able to find the answer to all my questions with Google, and this time I thought I had as well with the Windows app, but it brought upon too much of a feat for me to handle.
(Also, if there's an Automator process to batch rename files using a .txt file as a reference for the new names of the files, that'd be awesome as well.
I am new to Automator, and even though I have been tinkering around with it for about an hour, I can't seem to create an action.
What I want to do is have Automator automatically take the contents of a specific folder on my hard drive, print the contents of the folder (usually PDFs), then delete the files. I use dropbox, so when I place a pdf into this folder from my laptop on the go, it would be nice to come home to it printed, and no longer in the folder taking up space.
I have a program that can find duplicate files. What my questions is if I get an email from someone and then I forward it to someone now I have a duplicate one in my inbox and another in my sent. If I delete the one in my sent then when I open it the attachment will not show. Is there a way for it to just store the file once and then create an alias pointing to the main file.
Another example: If I attach a photo from iPhoto to an email there again is another duplicate. I would much rather Mail send the photo and create an alias to the original photo in iPhoto thus creating no duplicates.
I hope that was not confusing.
I want a program that will find duplicates and then keep 1 and create alias's for the one's deleted.
I know this is not all cases of duplicate files but mainly my Mail has way to many duplicates.
1 email attachments from web mail (eg Yahoo).I can't see how to do this -- is it possible? my current iPhoto set-up has managed to duplicate all my files. I see Events twice. shared access for all users on this computer there must be a way of doing this but I cannot find it. I see the ability to share across different computers - like mounting a remote file system - but that doesn't seem to give what I want and in any case restricts ownership priviledges to only the 1 owner. accessibility of backups. I believe iPhoto backs up the whole file that contains many photos - this is a "black box" that only iPhoto can access. I have a concern about this, it just feels less accessible than a series of JPGs. tell me I'm being irrational? I like this Application but the above points are just holding me back from committing to it.
Since I have switched from windows I have many duplicate files and even triplicate files! I was told (from a Mac Genius ) that leopard won't let you look at your picture files. So I want to rid the excess and save some hard drive space.
I am moving over to OSX on my iMac to manage my audio and image files. Right now I have them spread over several external hard drives on my PC. I have found a good program that does a very good job of identifying duplicates in both categories. They are called Audio Comparer and Video Comparer. Right now they only have windows versions. I am also looking at DupGuru Picture and Music editions which just happen to have a version for each platform. There is also Deep which I will try.
Does anyone have any good recommendations for Mac software that can perform these functions on several external hard drives? I do not plan to use iPhoto (Photoshop, Lightroom, and Lightzone) and obviously will be using iTunes but I desperately need to find and delete all the duplicate files before bringing into iTunes. I know iTunes can locate duplicate file, but names of them may be different since they have been in several Windows programs and formats (MP3, Flac, Apple Lossless....)
I could do this on the PC, but if I can avoid purchasing software that I will not use again (PC) versus doing it on the Mac and having the software for later use is my goal.
I managed to fumble my way through my first Automator actions today and after some trial and error, came up with a folder action that does exactly what I want, very simply to move music from my downloads folder to a different location. I also created an Automator application to do the same thing as I wasn't aware my folder action will now do this automatically (so cool). Here's my question: I have a few folder actions that were created during my trial and error process. Where are these and how do I delete/remove them? I did a Spotlight search and nothing came up.
If I press "command" "A" and than "command" "delete", will it erase only the duplicates and keep the one original file? Or will this delete the duplicate and the song I wish to keep?
My set up is that I use Mail with 5 separate accounts, downloading all messages using POP. I keep ALL my mail (even the trash) so that I have a permanent record of all conversations, going back more than 10 years - this is about 250,000 emails in around 250 subfolders. I'm running the latest version of Mavericks on a 2010 MBP. I have no intention of moving to IMAP - I need to keep a local archive of all my mail.Â
A few months ago I was having problems with Mail being very slow to load and search emails. I decided to rebuild the mailboxes, but afterwards discovered that thousands of messages in the inbox of one of my accounts (and some of the sub-folders) had disappeared. Once I realised I tried to go back to a recent Time Machine back up, but, for whatever reason, that part of the back up hadn't worked properly and I was unable to recover the previous status. I left it while I decided what to do, and had time to deal with it...Â
The last 2 years worth of emails on that account were still archived on gmail, so last week I decided to try redownloading the whole lot (something like 72,000 messages), and then planned to use one of the scripts I was aware of to remove the duplicates to the trash, and then remove any duplicates in the trash forever. That ought to mean I at least had an archive of the last two years of missing messages, even if I had no record of which ones had been flagged or replied to, etc.Â
The downloading took about 24 hours to complete, and I now have almost 70,000 messages in the inbox of that account. I also rebuilt all the folders again, which doesn't seem to have resulted in any further loss of messages as far as I can tell. However, I hadn't figured on two things:Â
1. Mail 'hides' duplicate messages, meaning that all of the messages I've downloaded are showing as unread, and I can't differentiate the ones I already had in my Inbox, and the new downloads. When I click on those apparently unread messages I can see if they have been replied to or forwarded, etc, but there's no obvious way for me to remove the ones I have already dealt with to the trash, without going through them all manually, which is clearly impossible.Â
2. The scripts I'd found for removing duplicates don't work. Andreas Amann's Remove Duplicates script doesn't work under Mavericks, and he has abandoned the project. I've also tried the remove-duplicate-messages.scpt [URL] ...., and while it *sometimes* works on individual subfolders on my Mac (but as far as I can tell removes the duplicate in that folder, rather than the newly downloaded version), mostly it doesn't work at all - it creates a 'Remove Duplicate Messages' folder on my desktop, a log inside it and a folder for removed messages, but nothing appears in the duplicates folder.Â
So, I'm left in a position where I have 70,000 apparently unread messages in my Inbox, a massively bloated Mail library (which has pretty much doubled in size, because of the 'hidden' messages), a slow and unresponsive Mail program. I've come to the conclusion that there must be some corrupted email somewhere, which probably caused the original email haemorrhage, and may still be causing the inability to remove duplicates. Mail is so slow as to be almost unuseable.Â
I figure I have a number of options:Â
1. I could live with the situation and just archive most of the Mail in my inbox, with the side effect that there will be a bunch of messages I have never replied to that are missed.Â
2. I could abandon the last week's efforts and revert to the version of Mail I was using a week ago, and then redownload the recent emails from my various accounts. That would still leave me without those thousands of emails I lost on my local machine.Â
3. I could find another way to deal with this. Can I get the remove duplicates script working? Should I revert to the version of Mail from a week ago, download ALL the messages again, but do it in a way that allows me to find the duplicates and remove them? Should I move to another email program altogether (which would presumably be massively disruptive to my work!)Â
I created a bit of a mess with iTunes 11 while migrating from Windows to Mac OS. Somehow I have duplicate subscriptions in the "My Podcasts" view. When I look at them, they don't have proper icons and the subscript setting is turned off (i.e. unsubscribed ). The listing that has an icon and has an episode count is working fine. Also, The duplicate subscription entries do not appear in the "list" podcast view. I tried using "Edit->delete" from the iTunes menu to delete them, but nothing happens.Â
Is there a way to get rid of these duplicate entries?Â
After syncing with iCloud (three computers and a phone) suddenly I am seeing multiple entries for the same contact in the address book and multiple entries in the calendars for the same event. How to stop this and how to delete the multiple entries without having to manually delete each item? The new Address book does noit seem to have a list view that shows the entire address book 9only shows addresses with two or three alphabets. Is there a setting to prevent this from happening? The value of iCloud is lessened when these issues crop up and there seems to be no defined method to fix the problem. I see numerous entries on the Support Community boards with the same problem.
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2), iMac Core Duo and MacBook Air Lion
The main issue is that in iTunes>Devices>Info>Sync Calendars, I see of Local calendars listed and also iCloud calendars listed (they show a portion of the address (CalDAV?) that they use to sync), and the issue is that I have DUPLICATE iCloud calendar entries here and I would love to remove them.
Here is my setup:
MBP with Lion and iPhone 3G with all updates.
All of my calendars sync with iCloud (I also have an iPad, but not issue with it.) and there are no duplicate calendars or events in iCloud on the web, so this is fine.I sync my iCloud/iCal calendars to my iPhone 3G (iOS 4.2.1) via iTunes and this is going well, so no problems here, either. I would just like to remove the duplicate iCloud calendars from iTunes under the Info pane so as to simplify life and my understanding. Also, there are other apps (like TimeTable) that go and read the master list of calendars. So, on this app, I see ALL of the calendars by name without being able to distinguish them any other way.how I can climb inside of iTunes and remove the duplicate iCloud calendar entries?
I use Google's Google Play and I made the mistake of Downloading my Library from the Google play Music Manager in my (early 2011) MacBook Pro's System Preferences after I already had my music library in iTunes so now I have a duplicate of every single song and not sure how to delete them. I tried using the the advice offered on here where I sort all music based on DATE but every song has the same date and about the same time so that won't work for me. Other then downloading a paid program I'm not sure what my options here are. That being said, let me know if anyone know what options other then paying for a program to do this for me or worse... having me click on every single duplicate song individually until I finish?Â
I am completely new to using Automator so I'm sure I've missed something very basic.
I created an action to automatically move music I download from a music site from the Downloads folder into the folder I want them in so I don't have to do it manually.
Problem is, the action moves everything that gets downloaded into the Downloads folder. What do I need to do to have only music files moved, leaving any other file type alone?
