Deleting duplicate photos

[givenout]

Happy New Years!

I have a couple of very basic questions. I have been working a few weeks to clean up my files/folders. I have photos, etc saved in many places on my computer and am moving everything photo and digi scrapbook-related to one folder in preparation of installing PSE5. Currently a large percentage of my photos are "disconnected" from the organizer so I'm essentially starting over.

1) Since I have put the same photos into different folders with alternate names, how can I determine which is the original? (Once I tried cleaning up and accidently deleted "duplicate" photos and discovered I actually deleted photos and kept "thumbnails". Want to avoid that.

2) Over the last couple of years I have downloaded many "freebies" and I'm still trying to figure the whole digi scrapbooking thing. I believe I want to save .gif , .jpeg , .psd , .png , but what about .bit and .wmf? Are these useable? Am I correct to keep .gif's too?

Thanks so much, I can't wait to get organized, load PSE5 and get to play.

Stacy

[IreneO]

1) If you have simply duplicated the photo and then put it into another folder, it may have named itself with "copy" as part of the file name. If not, and you haven't made any changes to the original or the duplicate, I don't believe it matters which copy you keep. Just look at the file size when you are deciding which one to keep. A thumbnail will be a small file size, so you know you can delete that one.

2) You probably won't use bmp and wmf files. Even some jpgs and gifs may not have the quality you want. It's time-consuming but if you look at each one at 100% and check the size of the image, you'll know whether you want to keep it or not.