Diff Utils - file and folder compare tools » Comparison Tools

How to avoid ineffective hard disk space utilization.

Bob Johnson — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:55:42 +0000

Nowadays huge amounts of hard disks on our computers allow us to save tons necessary and unnecessary information: music, video, documents, books, images etc. We can afford to store whatever we want unlimited time (we just think so). But finally we always get a message from our OS like “space is over”. What should we do in such case?

Of course we can buy another hard disk and forget about such messages for a short while. But also we can find and delete tons of “garbage” that filled free space. One of the most reliable methods is find and remove duplicate files.

There are many programs that offer to find and remove duplicate music, video, text files. But what about duplicates of image files. Sure, many programs can find all duplicated files just only by size and remove them. But there can be different size in two images that saved in different formats even if content of file is an equal.

In such case we need a program that has algorithms to find duplicate image files not only by extension or size but also by content.

Download Image Comparer

Image Comparer from Bolied Software can be helpful tool in searching and finding duplicate images on hard disk drive. One from many usable features of Image Comparer is special algorithm that can find duplicate image files even if they were renamed or converted to another format.

Just try Image Comparer from Boiled Software and use it from time to time and free space on your hard disk drive wont’ be utilized by image duplicate garbage anymore.

EC Merge Pro

Bob Johnson — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:06:08 +0000

New version of EC Merge Pro 2.2.100 a powerful comparison tool from Elle Computing has been released. EC Merge provides for side-by-side, two- and three-way diff/merge for files and folders, secure automatic merge. EC Merge has such types of comparison available:

File Comparison – option for comparison as text documents and also files that have text structure: program source, xml and the latest versions of Microsoft Word and Open Office documents.
Folder Comparison – option for comparison packs of files in several directories, merge and synchronize them.
Image Comparison – is very interesting feature. There’s a possibility to compare two images with the common ancestor, using three-way comparison interface. EC Merge Pro supports a large number of image formats. Each image is displayed in two or three panels: Original, Diff with Right/Left several comparison algorithms are available (differencing per channel, numerical component difference, attenuating similarities).

EC Merge Pro has two modes available for the work:

Graphical interface –this is a standard mode that provides all functionality of the program in graphical mode: user can do all actions as in similar windowed applications.
Command line interface – in this mode is possibly to make all actions that available in graphical mode in command line from comparison to merging and generating reports.

Report generation is important part of comparison programs. EC Merge Pro has extensive report functionality. The program is able to generate reports as for file and folders as well. Files and folders report can be generated in XML, HTML, Text and CSV format. EC Merge Pro supports third-party converters that allowing to convert PDF and Microsoft Office documents to plain text and extract files from ZIP/RAR archives. At the end of this month a new version of EC Merge Pro will be released. In EC Merge 2.2.102 will be added Microsoft Word DOC converter to compare directly the text (DOC format 97/2007) as rather interesing and useful feature. Interface of the program is multilingual.

EC Merge Pro is available in several languages: English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

EC Merge is developed fro the most popular platforms and can be running on Windows, Unix and MacOS systems.

Evaluate EC Merge (Windows)

Order EC Merge Pro (Windows)

The program is not free. There are two variants to evaluate and check functionality:

You can try demo with limited features for file and folder comparison;
You can get a free serial number for unlimited feature evaluation for one month from help section of EC Merge.

Full version can be purchased for $60 as single license.

PDF Comparison

Bob Johnson — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:50:34 +0000

There is no need to find huge and very expensive solution for document management in small companies. There’s no need to store and organize many documents in different formats and check them every day. There are many companies in the world that have little document flow and need maybe not so much time to check and compare documents, yearly reports and so on. But anyway it very useless to do this job manually, much better to speed up this routine work in times. Everything in the world using very popular and portable format “PDF” . Many companies using PDF as storage format for their documents.

Compare PDF it’s a small powerful program that have all required features to effective work with PDF documents. There are features available in Compare PDF:

File comparison in different ways – char by char, word by word and by keywords;
Folder comparison;
Highlighting differences between files or folders to easily make changes between versions;
Generation powerful and informational reports to print or analyze them;
Synchronization of folders with different entries;

Very useful feature is command line interface and possibility of integration with the other program products.

Order Compare PDF

The program is not free but developers offer fully functional 30-day free trial version to check and decide if it’s available for your needs or now. After trial period full version can be ordered only for $35 that no so much for such functionality.