Sorting filtering and collections

[Imaginerie]

Hello!
First of all, I am fairly familiar with Bridge BUT I do not use collections very often. I have a project with a client now, where I have to do a lot of culling and potentially identifying duplicates. I have around 4000 files in total (not all of them are images). The reason I have been asked is the client is taking over a business and their image assets are a mess. Lots of different folders, most of them empty, lots of them hosting images that aren't usable dating decades ago etc...
I waded through most of the different folders and assigned all the files I could find in different collections. My aim there was to not disrupt the somewhat crazy hierarchical system and only work on usable images.
Now I have around 4200 images in those folders and only have say 3000 in the collections. so there's 1200 missing, and I'm more or less certain that I put all of them in one of the collections.

So basically, I would like to know if there is a way to locate all the files that aren't in collections.
(so I can correct my mistakes)

I am aware of the script by @Lumigraphics (thank you for all that you do!) but it seems to do the opposite of what I want (tells you if a file is in a collection) but I may be mistaken.

In addition, is there a way to identify duplicates (I mean identical filenames) without opening everything?
There are lots and lots of different folders, subfolders, sub-subfolders, it would be a bit nightmarish to do that by hand.

Thank you in advance!

[Lumigraphics · Accepted solution]

First thing- duplicate the whole mess onto a new hard drive and shelve the old one as a backup.

I'd use a dupe-finder utility to filter out all the extras.

If the folder organization is a mess, dump it immediately. Start fromm scratch.

Use keywords and start right away catgorizing them. This works MUCH better than collections. I like collections as working organization.

Labels and ratings are great too. These are written into EXIF/XMP. If you aren't using those yet- load each collection, select all, and assign it a rating or label. Then show all files, if it isn't rated 3 then its not in a collection.

[Imaginerie]

Thanks for your insight!
The issue is that for the moment being, I have been told not to mess with the folder structure (hence why I used collections)
The duplicate thing, My OH will be making a little program for me, so this point is moot for now. However he knows nothing about Bridge (and I'll be crap at explaining to him what the .xml does in Bridge anyway 😂)
I already used a rating system to categorise sub-par/close ups, and acceptable product shots (color labels) That may have been a mistake on my part. Which leaves me just with the 1 to 5 star system.

But sorting by stars within each collection might be the way to go. Why didn't I think of it? 🤦‍

Just so that I give my OH some work to do, would there be a way (like coding a plugin) to make it work like I originally wanted? (a command that selects all the images NOT in collections)
He knows his way around the .xml format, and codes in Javascript, (among other things)

At this point it's just for curiosity as I'm perfectly OK with assigning a star rating and work from here as you expertly explained.

Thank you!

[Lumigraphics]

You can check if a file is in any collections. I don't know how fast that will be looping through them.

app.getCollections();

app.isCollectionMember();

[Imaginerie]

Thank you!