I have a Seagate Free Agent GoFlex external hard drive. My problem is that when I have backed up when I was using Windows, I have many duplicate pictures.. What I want to know is if it will work on Linux Mint 19, using Chrome browser..And if anyone knows of a software that will eliminate the duplicates? I hope that I have made it clear about my problem.
Thanks very much
Gary

It should work on Mint 19. Plug it in and see if the drive shows up.

Chrome browser is better designed to show you URL's or internet sites. It can show you files and directories, but more normal would be just to use the File Manager. Suggest you try that.

Duplicate photos:
If you have the same filenames, you can detect this a few ways. For me it might be copying all the files into one directory, duplicate file names, it would complain about and ask me if I wished to ignore or overwrite. I'd choose ignore and the result would be all unique files, by filename.

If you have photos which are duplicates in appearance, because someone took several at once, and they are different file names. For me the only software would be my vision there. Perhaps there is something else, but that's all I can think of in that case.

I have/had a GoFlex Home - it ran a variety of Linux, but the only sane way to use it was the Windoze dashboard. I set it up that way and later found a post online that allowed me to ssh into it from my Linux systems. So yes, if you bust the case open and plug the disk itself in you should be able to access it from Linux.
The disk died in mine, so after ignoring it for a while I put a new disk in it and a proper Arch Linux ARM distro on it so I could simply use it as a normal (Linux) backup server.

As for the duplicate photos there are a bunch of tools available - I only use the command line ones, but there are GUI front-ends as well; fslint for example. Various threads here and all over the web. Most have a quick verification based on size, then do a md5 or SHA comparison.

As rtmistler pointed out: don't worry about your browser. It's not really a part of the problem or of a solution.

Are you concerned about whether the drive will work when it's connected to your Linux system? I'm almost certain the answer is yes.

I know of no canned software what will go out and remove duplicate photos (or any duplicate files, for that matter). I've been sloppy in the past when I was short on disk space and offloaded photos from my cameras into various places scattered around my disks where I had free space. I had to write scripts to clean up the messes I've made.

You have some options when it comes to dealing with the duplicate photos. If that drive is a Windows formatted drive -- NTFS for example -- I'm not sure I'd want to do a massive check on the files and be doing any deletions while they're living on an NTFS volume. What I'd consider doing is build a parallel directory tree on your Linux system that contains only the photos:
This will duplicate all the photos on the Seagate drive under the "/phototgt" directory preserving the directory structure where the photos are found on the Seagate. The photos on the Seagate are your backup if something goes awry while you're trying to remove any duplicates. You can do whatever duplicate photo removal is needed on the files under "/phototgt". If your duplicate removal process fails to produce the results you're looking for, you can start over by re-issuiing the "find ... | cpio ..." command to try again. (This is handy if you're as paranoid about your photos as I am.)

I don't recommend identifying duplicate photos as using filenames. If you have used multiple digital cameras -- which, maddeningly, don't give the photographer much in the way of naming options -- or friends have sent you photos there's too much opportunity for photos that aren't the same just happening to have the same filename. The process I've used to find and remove duplicates is to examine checksums of the JPEGs and compare those to identify duplicates. In general, you:

• Generate a master list of all JPEGs and their checksums.
• Extract the checksums, sort them, and find those which appear more than once.
• Use that list of checksums to grep the master list for photos that have duplicates.
• Finally, run a script that reads through the output of the above grep to keep one file and remove the duplicates. (Another option is to remove a duplicate and replace it with a symbolic link back to the original.)

This really isn't that complex (well, maybe that last step is) and is a great way to learn some of the common Linux command line utilities. If you're up to issuing shell commands and writing some scripts I can walk you through this.

HTH...

As for finding duplicates, "fslint" does a pretty good job.