Adobe Illustrator is a creative graphics designing software used to make professional quality artworks, illustrations, and computerized drawings. It is renowned and widely used by visual artists, graphics designers, website developers, logo designers, billboard ad agencies due to its ability to render high-quality graphics, logos, sketches, charts, diagrams, and cartoons.
If you are a professional photographer, Illustrator can help you manipulate as well as recolor your work and even turn your photographs into wonderful sketches with artistic effects.
You may add text & curves into your graphics to make creative logos. You may choose from a wide variety of pre-installed old styled, transitional, modern and simplistic fonts.
One of the distinct features of Illustrator is the ability to render high-quality designs regardless of the screen resolution. In other words, the graphic will not be resolution-depended, unlike most other photo editing tools. The design quality will not be negatively impacted even when you enlarge the image. This makes Illustrator the most favorable tool for creating large billboard advertisements and advertisement posters.
Illustrator can export your artwork into numerous file formats including PDF, EPS, WMF, VML, SVG, apart from other popular image formats such as JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, and not to mention Adobe-family file formats (such as Photoshop PSD), and AutoCAD Drawing & Interchange formats.
The company charges a subscription-based payment model for individuals and businesses. Illustrator is currently available for a free trial period of 7 days.
There are many ways to learn Illustrator such as training centers, workshops, and coaches. However, in this age of the Internet, many choose to join online courses, e-classrooms and download ebooks to avoid traveling to remote destinations.
Sweep the Illustrator Library and Make it Clutter-free, Duplicate-free
As graphics designers, we tend to create extra copies of our work in case of emergency situations such as system crashes, laptop thefts, and other uncertain calamities.
These duplicates serve as important backups.
However, too many duplicate copies can mess up the entire image library.
You may find yourself in a situation doing the same task over and again on different versions of the same file.
Moreover, searching through an entire collection of image library may not become easier as you may come across too many irrelevant files.
Not to mention, this can negatively impact your productivity and waste your precious work hours.
As of now, Adobe Illustrator does not contain any in-house functionality to find and delete your duplicate files.
But there is no need to feel disappointed. There’s another safer way to deal with this issue.
Safer Way to Find Duplicate Illustrator Files
Clone File Checker is a little nifty utility designed by Sorcim Technologies. This cross-platform duplicate files finder runs on both Windows and Mac computer systems.
It employs the Fuzzy Matching Algorithm which makes it extremely easy and most importantly, accurate, to find Illustrator images that are absolutely identical in nature, a.k.a duplicates.
What is File Metadata? How Does It Matter During Duplicate Search?
Each document, music, image and video file has Metadata stored in it.
Metadata contains various type of information such as the name of the author, copyright message, date of creation, height/ width, image resolution, color components, text encoding method, and so on.
Clone Files Checker has an integrated Music Scan Mode option that performs a tag-specific scan. This means that it can perform a music-specific search based on different criterion such as Title, Album, Album artist, Duration, Year, Bit rate, and so on.
With a Single Scan, You Can Reclaim Chunks of GBs
Don’t perform the tedious task of finding duplicates your own. Conserve your time and energy towards designing high-quality arts and graphics than going through every bit of your image library.
A single CFC scan can make room for newer files and gives you a well-organized, trimmed and clutter-free image library. CFC groups together all dupes for easy deletion and has an in-house feature to automatically select duplicates and keep only the newest/ oldest version in each group of files.
Simplified Scan Procedure
Follow the steps given below to automatically identify duplicate Illustrator files.
No action will be performed on the duplicates without your approval. It is up to you whether to delete them or to a folder of your liking to avoid accidental deletion of your important work.
Step # 1: Install CFC
- Download Clone File Checker from the official website: https://www.clonefileschecker.com/
- Follow the installer wizard, and then launch the program once it’s installation has been successful.
Step # 2: Select Your Illustrator Library
- Click the Add button.
- Select the folder that contains your Illustrator designs.
- You may add multiple folders if required.
Step # 3: Customize The Scan for Better Results
- Select the Custom option, and then check Images. Leave rest of the options unchecked.
- You may also wish to use the Ignore files smaller than and/ or Ignore files larger than scan filters to limit the scope of your scan.
- You can optionally, even select the Show Preview checkbox to be able to view the previews of images that have been detected as duplicates.
- Click Start Search.
- The scan may take some time depending on the size of your image library and the computer speed.
Step # 4: Review Your Files
After the scan is finished, you’ll be able to see the list of duplicates with additional information such as Name, Type, Size, Modified Date etc.
There are two ways to select duplicates:
- You may want to go through the entire list and manually select duplicates that you wish to delete/ move.
- Alternatively, click on the Select Duplicates button and choose selection criteria to automatically select duplicates while retaining the newest, oldest, most modified, least modified or by location version of each file.
Step # 5: Fix Duplicates
- Click the Select Action button.
- Choose whether you want to permanently delete the Illustrator duplicate files or you want to move them a separate new folder to review them at a later point of time.
