Photo recovery and duplicate removal

I’m currently in the process of recovering all the digital photos that were ever taken in my family. I’ve extracted data in multiple ways from damaged hard disks, broken CDs, almost unreadable floppy drives and so on.

My main problem now, having collected so much data (and in so many copies, especially with broken data supports I tried different data carving tools in order to recover as many photos as possible) is how to automatically remove damaged copies and remove duplicates.

I’ve used bad Peggy in order to move to a different folder the “damaged” files, yet some of them are showing up perfectly even if the program categorized them as damaged, while I keep find a few that appear to be severely damaged and yet haven’t been moved.

I managed to clean up all the mess with the still damaged pictures in the “good” folder by hand, and did multiple scans with visipics, alldup (with every picture hashing method), Gemini and PhotoSweeperX on Mac. Now every “good picture” doesn’t have any duplicate, but I still need to sort out the “damaged folder” removing damaged copies of the photos I already have in the good one so that I can sort the “damaged ones” in order to save the few ok ones and the few damaged but still usable ones.

The thing is most picture comparison softwares actually make a low-res image comparison or use other “content aware” hashing method. This works perfectly when using duplicates of not damaged photos, yet when you’re working with damaged jpegs, that usually have just half or (sometimes way) less of the image, this doesn’t work at all as the duplicate finding software detects the damaged jpg like some sort of solid gray image.

Does anyone know of any photo comparison software that compares images in a pixel by pixel way? By pixel by pixel I mean that it compares the colored pixel starting from top left and going down just like us LTR language readers do on a printed page?

Thanks in advance.