iOS 16 comes with a lot of love for the Apple Photos app and one of the useful new additions is an integrated duplicate finder. Here’s how to use the new feature to remove duplicate photos from your iPhone a few at a time or in large batches.
In addition to the ease of capturing high-quality images with the iPhone, it’s easy to let our photo library pile up with many shots, which can include a good number of duplicate photos.
So far, the best solution has been to use a third-party app to try to stifle duplicates, but this can be a muddy process with paid apps or apps that may not work as well as claimed.
Now with iOS 16, Apple offers a built-in tool for finding and removing duplicate photos from iPhone that is very easy to use.
This is how Apple describes the function of merging duplicates:
“Fusion combines relevant data such as captions, keywords, and favorites into a high-quality photo. Albums that contain combined duplicates are updated with the combined photo.”
Apple also notes that discarded duplicates will appear in the Recently Deleted album in case you want to check what is being sent to the Trash or retrieve any photos.
Duplicate iPhone photos: how to delete them with iOS 16
iOS 16 is currently available as a beta for developers. The free public beta of iOS 16 will arrive in July. Learn more about installing iOS 16 in our full guide.
- With iOS 16, open the Native Photos app on your iPhone
- Choose the Albums tab at the bottom
- From the Albums main screen, swipe down
- In the Utilities section, tap Duplicates
- Review duplicate matches and tap Combine to remove duplicate photos from iPhone
- You can also choose Select in the upper right to select everything or choose multiple duplicates to combine them faster
- And you can tap on any of the duplicate suggestions to go to where they are in your photo library to see how they look like.
In our time using the new feature, it works very accurately. On that note, it seems less aggressive than third-party applications when it comes to recommending duplicates for deletion, which is probably tied to their accuracy.
Here’s how the process looks on the iPhone:
If you choose to merge / delete duplicates per instance found by iOS 16, tap the Merge button on the right to approve it, then tap “Merge X duplicates”.
One clear aspect of the feature is that each photo includes the size in the lower right corner so you can quickly see how much space you can save.
The following shows how the duplicates found seem to be played to get a closer look. Swipe left or right to see the other duplicates of the game. There’s also a “Combine All” button at the top right when duplicates are displayed this way.
The fastest way to delete duplicate photos from your iPhone is to use the Select button at the top right, and then you can select everything or tap / drag to choose which ones you want to delete.
Learn more about iOS 16:
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