■ Too many photos, not all of them worth keeping

Once upon a time to shoot a picture you needed a camera with film in it, which cost money. Now we are all "trigger-happy", shooting photos with our mobile phones without a second thought. Arguably a large portion of those hastily assembled photos are junk fit only for the recycle bin, but as it isn't easy going though hundreds or thousands of pictures to discover the bad ones, they are left cluttering our hard disk or cloud drive.

xplorer² has many tools for disk cleanup, helping you visualize the folders taking up most space, discover duplicate files etc. Version 4.2 introduced some tools to manage the quality of your photo collection, making it easier to find the bad pictures and delete them without much manual labor!

Photo blur index. This is a file detail (column) you select into the detailed view to see a quality assessment of JPG pictures. Numbers >100 indicate something's wrong with the picture (over- or under-exposed, out of focus, blurry or shaken etc). If you sort a picture folder by the Blur column you will find the worst pictures near the end of the list. Delete those to free up storage and clutter.
Discover similar pictures. Sometimes files and pictures are facsimile, exact duplicates eating up space. Other photos are slightly different but you may regard them as "duplicates". Think of when you take 10 shots of the same scene and you only want to keep the best of them and discard the rest. Just place your photos in a scrap container and use Find similar photos menu command. A similarity threshold of 70 looks like a good level to group similar pictures but you can tweak it up and down to taste.

Please watch the demo video to see how to use the new picture quality commands and clean up your photo collection:

The blurred and similarity index of JPG files is approximate and probabilistic, so it should be taken with a pinch of salt. You shouldn't trust the blur column unreservedly, always inspect the JPG pictures deemed bad before deleting them!