Duplicate iPhone Photos: iOS 16 Guide

iOS 16 is a big fan of the Apple Photos app, and one of the cool new additions is the built-in duplicate finder. Here’s how it works to use the new feature to remove duplicate iPhone photos a few at a time or in large batches.

While it’s easy to create high-quality images with your iPhone, it’s easy for our photo library to accumulate a lot of pictures, which can include a large number of duplicate photos.

So far, the best solution has been to use a third party app to try and suppress duplicates, but this can be a confusing process with paid apps, or apps that may not work as well as advertised, etc.

Now with iOS 16, Apple offers a built-in tool to find and remove duplicate iPhone photos that is very easy to use.

Here’s how Apple describes the merge duplicates feature:

“The merge combines relevant data such as captions, keywords and favorites into one photo of the highest quality. Albums containing merged duplicates are updated with the merged photo.”

Apple also notes that deleted duplicates will show up in the Recently Deleted album in case you want to check what was deleted or restore any snapshots.

Duplicate iPhone Photos: How to Remove from iOS 16

iOS 16 is currently available as a developer beta. The free public beta of iOS 16 is due out in July. Learn more about installing iOS 16 in our complete guide.

With iOS 16 running, open the native Photos app on iPhone. Select the Albums tab at the bottom. From the main Albums screen, swipe down. In the Utilities section, tap Duplicates. View duplicate matches and tap “Merge” to remove duplicate iPhone photos. Select “Select All” in the upper right corner, or select multiple duplicates for faster merging. You can tap on any of the suggested duplicates to navigate to where they are in your photo library for a closer look at how similar they are.

Nowadays, with the help of a new function, it works very accurately. On that note, it seems to be less aggressive than third-party apps in recommending duplicates for deletion, which is likely due to its accuracy.

Here’s what the process looks like on iPhone:

If you choose to merge/remove duplicates for each instance found by iOS 16, click the “Merge” button on the right to confirm, then click “Merge X Duplicates”.

One useful aspect of this feature is that each photo is sized in the bottom right corner so you can quickly see how much space you can save.

Below is what it looks like to click on found duplicates to see them closer. Swipe left or right to see other duplicates in the match. There is also a “Merge All” button in the top right corner when viewing duplicates this way.

The fastest way to remove duplicate iPhone photos is to use the “Select” button on the top right corner, then you can “Select All” or tap/swipe to choose which ones to remove.

Learn more about iOS 16:

Reading now