You can instead use a third-party duplicate file scanning program to find identical files on an external hard drive without having to search through folders.

Jeff Fehring wants a way to find and eliminate duplicate songs in his large music collection. There are plenty of good programs for finding duplicate files–based on file name, size, and ...

How to Use Picasa to Search for Duplicate Photos. Google's Picasa sorts and displays images on your computer, but does not actually create copies of those images to store internally.