Similars and Photo Statistics

What it is for

A photo library that has been running for years accumulates a specific set of problems. The same shot exists three times because it was imported from three cards. Nobody knows how much of the catalog is JPEG and how much is raw. A batch of HEIC files copied off a phone has gone quietly bad. And a folder of pictures from 2019 has capture dates in 1970 because a camera lost its battery.

None of these is hard to fix once you can see it. All of them are invisible until something surfaces them. This plugin adds four tools to Lightroom Classic that do exactly that, under Library › Plug-in Extras.

Find similar photographs

Groups visually similar images in the current selection using HSV colour-histogram comparison with a structural-correlation check on top. That combination matters: a histogram alone will happily group two unrelated sunsets, and structure alone is slow and brittle. Together they find the burst of near-identical frames you meant to cull, and the same photograph imported twice at different sizes.

Results are offered back as Lightroom collections, so you review and delete inside Lightroom with everything you normally have to hand — you are never asked to make deletion decisions inside a plugin dialog.

File-type statistics

Reports what the selection actually contains, by file type. Useful before a migration, before buying storage, or when deciding whether a raw-to-DNG conversion is worth the afternoon it will cost.

Corrupt HEIC detection

HEIC files fail in a particularly unhelpful way: the catalog still shows a thumbnail, and the underlying file is unreadable. The plugin validates HEIC containers directly and flags the ones that have gone bad, so you find out while the originals may still exist elsewhere rather than years later.

Capture-date repair

Flags photographs whose capture year disagrees with the folder they are filed in — the usual signature of a camera clock that reset. You tell the plugin what your library’s root folder is called, and it works out each photo’s expected year from its path.

How it runs

The comparison work is done by small native helpers bundled inside the plugin, not in Lua — image comparison across thousands of files is not something a scripting layer should attempt. The libraries they depend on ship inside the plugin folder with their load paths rewritten, so there is nothing to install alongside it and no Homebrew dependency on the machine that runs it.

What it does not do