PSE10 Remove Duplicate Photos

Question

I am running PSE10 on Win 7, and have found myself with a bit of a mess I'd like to clean up.  My Catalog has many hundred duplicate photos.  These are pairs of items that point to the same physical photo via a different path.  All follow the pattern of C:\Documents and Settings\Chris\My Documents\...   and  C:\Users\Chris\Pictures...
I have tried using the Search for duplicate photos function, which does identify the duplicates, but it also finds tons of false positives, photos that merely look alike but are not actual duplicates.  Sorting through these is not feasible.
I could perhaps identify the My Documents versions by deleting the shortcut to My Documents in the OS and seeing which images need to be reconnected.  However my tags are all attached to the C:\Documents and Settings versions.
I'm looking for a good way to identify actual duplicate photos in the catalog, rather than merely similar ones.
The workflow I imagine is: identify duplicate photos | transfer tags to C:\Users version | delete C:\My Documents version.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Chris
PS  I'll note that I am experienced with databases and sql, on the off chance the catalog is really a simple sqlite database that I can manipulate.

Answer 1

99jon wrote:
  I would have thought there may possibly be a database tool which could extract the details into a table.
Unfortunately I don’t know one.
If the table could be sorted it may be possible to delete all the lines with Documents & settings/My Documents and then resave the file. Then replacing the existing db file with the newly saved version.
It’s worth a shot.
That's pretty much the approach I'm leaning toward right now.
The complicating matter is the tags and album data.  Chris will have to give us the details, but if the "incorrect" file location data is the only data that has tags and albums, there will be some fancy SQL footwork needed to attach the tags and albums to the "correct" file location data.
In general, the procedure would be to:
Create a temporary table and populate it with the "incorrect" file location data (which contains correct reference keys to tags and albums) from the main media table.
Use that temporary table to attach the tags and album reference keys to the "correct" file location data in the main media table.
Use that temporary table to delete the "incorrect" file location records references from all the other tables.
Use that temporary table to delete the "incorrect" file location records from the main media table.
Delete the temporary table.
That can be done without creating a temporary table, but the subsequent SQL queries would contain somewhat hellish WHERE clauses.  All this can be done in a straightforward manner using SQL queries in Database.Net.
Ken