Duplicate photos on your iPhone? Here’s how to quickly remove the extras
Whether it’s a photo that captures an important memory or just an ordinary moment, taking photos is a common habit. We often take multiple photos to get the perfect photo and then forget to delete the duplicate photos, which ends up taking up precious storage space on our iPhone or in iCloud.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way around this problem, built into your iPhone if you have iOS 16 or later.
Apple introduced the “duplicate detection” feature in 2022 and it works exactly as the name suggests. The tool uses on-device AI to identify identical images and merge them into an easy-to-find album in the Photos app. Apple says the iPhone classifies duplicates not only as exact copies, but also as photos that look the same but have unique resolutions, file formats or other minor differences.
Read more: iOS 18: Your iPhone will get upgrades for Messages, Photos, and more this fall
Delete duplicate photos and videos to get more storage space on your iPhone.
Make sure you enable iCloud sync before going through the step-by-step process below.
Here’s how to use the iPhone’s built-in tool to free up storage space:
1. Open the Photos app on your iPhone.
2. Tap the Albums tab at the bottom of the screen.
3. Scroll down to the Utilities section and tap Duplicates. Here you can view all duplicate photos on your iPhone and delete them individually or at once.
4. For the last option, tap Select in the top right corner.
5. Crane Select All to merge all duplicate photos that your iPhone detects and delete them at the same time.
6. To delete duplicates individually, scroll up and tap To combine on your chosen selection of duplicate images. Then tap To combine [number] Copies to remove duplicates. Go ahead and repeat this step for all the identical photos you want to delete.
Merging preserves the best version of the photo in your library. The duplicates are moved to it Recently Deleted album.
If you found this iOS 16 feature useful, check out CNET’s cheat sheet for iOS 17. For more advice on how to save space, read our full list of tips for freeing up your iPhone’s storage space.
