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Though Digikam provides a nice feature of finding duplicate photos, it does not, for what I can see, make it easy to delete duplicates and keep original photos. I hope that the function is somewhere there, but I could not find it.
How do I hide reference images and display only duplicates to delete them?
I cannot do "Restriction: Exclude reference album", since all of my original photos and duplicates are in the same album (folder).
I'm just experimenting with digikam. But it is easy to mark the non-reference images as "rejected" by clicking the image and then alt-1.
Laborious but I like to see what folders they're in anyway. Once you have a pile marked then go to the label view and filter those "rejected," select all of them and then hit del.
Like you I do not see anything to let me select all the non-reference images in one fell swoop, open them in a window to confirm the action and then wipe them out.
I have found it easy to keep "originals" (reference images) by sorting them so that the the reference images are last. Then I can select just the duplicates. The steps are laid out in this "It's Foss" article How to Find and Remove Duplicate Photos in Linux
Since all of your pictures are in one folder, you can simply do the following.
If you want to delete duplicate photos for [multiple] images at the same time, select all the images from the left sidebar.
Now, go to the file menu -> View -> Sort Items and select By Similarity. This will put all the referenced images at the bottom. You can select all the images in the right sidebar that are NOT labelled as duplicate and press the delete button.
For those who are scanning across different folders, it is possible to "group" them in digiKam and do the same technique. The only downside is that you cannot choose which folder is the "original".
By default, the duplicate photos are divided into sections based on their location, i.e. folders. You may change that by going to View->Separate Items in the file menu.
I choose "Flat List" for the above.
Final notes, This takes some scrolling to select things the way you want, but it still is a time saver.
Warning! If you select many images on the left bar, give DigiKam some time to do the sorting before you try selecting.
Use a dedicated duplicate photo cleaner tool or software (many are available for both desktop and mobile platforms) to scan your entire photo library and identify duplicate images. These tools will usually compare file hashes, metadata, or visual similarities to detect duplicates.
