English | 日本語
Tools → Find Similar Files… looks through a folder for files you probably don’t need twice:
| Method | Finds | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| Identical files | the same content under different names or in different folders | nothing more |
| Similar images | the same picture resized, re-encoded or lightly edited | nothing more |
| Similar videos | the same video re-encoded or resized, and clips cut from a longer video | ffmpeg on your PATH |
| Similar audio | the same recording re-encoded, or with its tags changed | fpcalc from Chromaprint on your PATH (brew install chromaprint, apt install libchromaprint-tools) |
The detection is done by similar-files, which XeFM runs for you. A method that is missing something shows in the menu what to install.
The scan starts at once and runs as a program of its own. A video scan can take hours. You can keep using XeFM, or quit it: the scan carries on, and the next time XeFM starts it tells you what finished while it was closed.
The status bar’s right end shows how it is going:
⠋ Similar videos extract 42%
and says when it is done:
✓ Similar videos: 12 groups
Click that, or open View → Background Jobs…, and choose the scan. Its
results open in a new tab of the pane, a tree file
with one folder per group. The folder you were in stays in its own tab, and
closing the results tab (Ctrl-W) takes you back to it. In each group, the file the others were compared with comes
first.
Enter on a group shows its files. View and compare them there.sync_other_to_current (see Tree Files).
The other pane shows them as one list, wherever they live.Backspace goes back up to the list of groups.You don’t have to wait for the end. While a scan runs, choosing it in the jobs list offers Look at the groups so far. The results are rewritten every few minutes as the scan goes, and the pane follows. Those groups are provisional: a file the scan reads later can still join a group or start a new one. The header says so until the scan is done. Groups of identical files never change once they appear.
Nothing is ever deleted for you. Deciding which copy to keep is up to you.
Choose a running scan in the jobs list, then Stop the scan. It stops within a second or so, and the groups it had found are kept.
Stopping, putting the computer to sleep or restarting it doesn’t waste the work done. similar-files remembers what it has already read, so running the same scan again picks up quickly.
ssh:// or s3:// can’t be scanned from here yet.~/.xefm/scans/, one folder per scan, with the
results file (result.xft) and the scan’s log. Nothing is written beside your files. The ten most recent
finished scans are kept.