Blurry photos are a mess wherever they are. Whether these photos are sitting in a professional photographer’s computer system, or with the end customer, they serve virtually no purpose at all. These photos are of no good and can easily, or rather must be removed to recover tons of storage space.
The issues caused by blurry photos aren’t just limited to valuable storage space being lost as they slow down image searches, create an unnecessary crowd, and most importantly cause huge disorganization. Use Clone Files Checker and clean up the mess within minutes.
Clean Up Blurred Photos in Your Laptop
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Let’s go about trying out the following methods and use them to identify all the blurry photos sitting in our laptop’s hard drive.
Adobe Lightroom
First up is the trademark Adobe product, which we’re pretty sure most of you were expecting. This software contains 2 features that can help us detect blurred photos.
- Flagging Technique
We will deploy Lightroom and use the flagging technique to uncover all the blurry photos. The method is very simple and straightforward.
Simply use the Library Module filter to flag and unflag photos. After selecting the photos, allow them to be populated on the screen. Once they’re there on the screen, either swipe right or press X to mark them as un-flagged. All that remains to be done is deleting the flagged photos later on.
You can use this technique to sift through thousands of photos within minutes. The option will work really fine and help you find blurred photos that had caused a huge mess in the hard disk. However, be advised that this technique won’t deliver perfect results and some photos might escape the scan.
- Exposure Time Check
Yet another method to check blurred photos is by using the Exposure Time Check method available in Adobe Lightroom. If the exposure time check value is more than 5, the image is more likely to be blurred. A decent value for ETC is between 0 and 4.
And now when it comes to calculating the ETC value, But you don’t have to calculate it manually because Adobe Lightroom has a built-in plugin to do so.
You can read more about how the script works and where to download the Lightroom plugin in this blog post.
Adobe Photoshop Elements
Next up is another Adobe product, the Adobe Photoshop Elements. It contains a handy feature that can remove the blurred effect from photos. Adobe has named this new feature as Shake Reduction. This feature helps users easily fix blurred images, provided the blurred effect was caused by the camera shaking due to the user’s mistake.
Simply add a photo that you want to remove the blurriness from and click the Enhance menu. Now select the Auto Shake Reduction option and the inbuilt intelligence mechanism in Adobe Photoshop Elements will do the corrective work itself. If you want to do it on your own, click the Enhance menu and this time select the Shake Reduction option. And now you can apply the corrective steps manually and remove the blur.
Tip: You can apply this technique on all the photos that you have detected as blurred photos from the 2 Adobe Lightroom features described above. This comes in particularly handy when you only have a single photo of a precious moment which is sadly a blurred one. Instead of deleting it or leaving it in its semi-helpful state, you can do wonders by following this technique.
Detect Blurred Images with Python & OpenCV
Another computer program that can help us find blurred photos is OpenCV. This is basically a library of programming functions that was developed by Intel. It is available free-for-use under the open-source BSD license.
If you’re either well versed with programming, or can spare some time as well as energy and to learn this language, here is how you can put this to good use and uncover blurred images on your computer.
The OpenCV tool uses the total variance of the Laplacian of an image. You will have to calculate the Fast Fourier Transform value (FFT). If the FFT value is higher, the image is most likely blurred. But you should note that OpenCV can’t be relied upon to detect blurred images with utmost accuracy. However, this is a great tool indeed to speed up the whole process. Here is the complete GitHub repository.
Final Word
A neat trick worth mentioning is to use all of the following solutions to ensure the maximum number of blurred photos are removed. So even if a single software leaves out a few images, you have the other one ready to do the needful.