iOS 16 comes with a lot of love for the Apple Photos app and one useful new addition is the built-in duplicate finder. Here’s how to use the new feature to delete duplicate iPhone photos a few times at a time or in large batches.
Besides the ease of taking high-quality photos with the iPhone, our photo library is easy to accumulate too many shots, which can include a good amount of duplicate photos.
So far the best solution has been to use a third party app to try to suppress duplicates but it can be a muddy process with paid apps or apps that may not work as well as claimed, etc.
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Now with iOS 16, Apple offers a built-in tool to find and delete duplicate iPhone photos, which is very easy to use.
Here’s how Apple describes the feature to merge duplicates:
“Merge combines related data such as captions, keywords, and favorites into a single image with the highest quality. Albums with merged duplicates are updated with the merged image.”
Apple also notes that ignored duplicates will appear in the Recently Deleted album in case you want to check what’s being deleted or restore any snapshots.
Duplicate Photos on iPhone: How to Delete with iOS 16
- Running iOS 16, open the original app photo app on iPhone
- Choose the Albums tab At the bottom
- From the main albums screen, swipe down
- Under the utilities section, Click on duplicates
- See duplicate matches and Click Merge To delete duplicate iPhone photos
- Could you Choose also Select in the upper-right corner to select all or select multiple duplicates to merge them more quickly
- And you can click on any of the duplicate suggestions to head to its place in your photo library to take a closer look at how similar they are
In our time using the new feature, it works very accurately. On that note, it appears to be less aggressive than third-party apps in recommending deleting duplicates – which is likely related to its accuracy.
Here’s what the process looks like on the iPhone:
If you choose to Merge/Delete duplicates for each instance found by iOS 16, click Merge button on the right side to agree, then tap Merge X Duplicates.
One neat aspect of the feature is that each image includes the size in the lower right corner so you can quickly see how much space you might save.
Below is what it looks like when you click on the found duplicates to take a closer look. Swipe left or right to see other occurrences in the match. There is also a Merge All button in the upper right corner when viewing duplicates this way.
The fastest way to delete duplicate iPhone photos is to use the select button in the upper right corner, then you can select all or click/drag to choose the photos you want to remove.
Read more about iOS 16:
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