Duplicate photos on your iPhone? How to quickly delete 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 shots to get the perfect picture and then forget to delete the duplicates, which ends up using up valuable storage space on our iPhone or iCloud.

Luckily, there is an easy way to work around this issue in your iPhone if you are using iOS 16 or later.

Apple introduced its Duplicate Detection feature in 2022 and it works exactly as the name suggests. The tool uses on-device AI to identify identical images and combine them into an easy-to-find album in the Photos app. According to Apple, 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 gets upgrades for Messages, Photos, and more this fall

Make sure you turn on iCloud sync before following the step-by-step process below.

Here’s how to use iPhone’s built-in tool to free up storage space:

1. Open that Photos app on your iPhone.

2. Tap Albums tab at the bottom of the screen.

3. Scroll down to Utilities section and tap on it Duplicates. Here you can view all duplicate photos on your iPhone and delete them individually or all at once.

4. For the latter option, tap Choose in the top right corner.

5. Knock Choose All to merge all duplicate photos detected by your iPhone and delete them at the same time.

6. If you want to delete duplicates individually, scroll up and tap Merge on the selection of duplicate images you have chosen. Then tap Merge (number) Copies to delete duplicates. Go down the line and repeat this step for all the identical photos you want to delete.

Merging keeps the best version of the photo in your library. The duplicates are moved to the Recently Deleted Album.

If you found this iOS 16 feature helpful, check out CNET’s iOS 17 cheat sheet. For more advice on saving storage space, check out our full list of tips for clearing iPhone storage.