How to Merge or Delete Duplicate Photos on Your iPhone
There are some iOS features you didn’t even know you needed, and this is definitely one of them. iOS 16 has an innovative trick up its sleeve that allows you to merge all duplicate photos and videos within a couple of taps.
You can take advantage of this to quickly free up storage space on your iPhone. Here, we’ll teach you how to use this feature, but before that, let’s see why it can be handy.
Why Merge Duplicate Photos?
You may save the same meme to your Photos app again and again at different time intervals, or you may scroll up and take a screenshot of an old photo to show to someone. Over time, you will inevitably create multiple duplicates of certain media in your Photos app.
This feature will allow you to declutter and organize your photos in the best way possible by keeping only the highest quality version of a photo. Kind of perfect, isn’t it?
Moreover, if you’re an iPhone user, you probably live with the impending dread of the"iPhone Storage Full"notification. You want to avoid that at any cost, and deleting duplicates is a big step towards more free storage on your device.
How to Merge All Duplicate Photos
Finding and deleting these duplicates is pretty straightforward. There’s a separate folder for them in your Photos app. So, follow these steps to merge all duplicates at once:
Once this is done, the Photos app will keep one copy of the duplicates with the highest quality and relevant data in your library. The others will all be moved toRecently Deleted.
The Photos app also allows you to delete all your duplicates using the same method, but this will move all copies of the photos to the Recently Deleted folder without retaining even a single copy.
How to Only Merge a Set of Duplicates
On the other hand, you could choose to merge only a specific set of duplicates and leave the rest alone. To do that:
An important thing to note here is the prompt you get after you begin to merge duplicates may vary for different people. You may only getMerge X CopiesorMerge X Exact Copies, or you may get both of them together.
This depends on the type of duplicates you have in your Photos app. Apple defines exact copies as the same photos with different metadata, while duplicates that aren’t exact may appear the same but have unique resolutions, file formats, or other slight differences.
Why You Can’t See the Duplicates Folder
Some users claim that the folder simply does not exist for them. For one, this folder will not appear if you don’t have any duplicates in your Photos app. But this is unlikely if you’ve had your device for a long time.
A more likely explanation is that your iPhone takes a while to scan your Photos app to identify duplicates. If you’ve added some duplicate photos today, it may take a few days for them to appear. However, if waiting doesn’t seem to work, make sure you’ve iOS 16 or later installed andrestart your iPhone.
Use This Hidden iOS Feature to Declutter Your Photos App
Merging duplicates allows you to clear up some much-needed iPhone storage with just a few taps. You can merge all duplicates at once, do that separately, or even delete them altogether.
But before you do, check that you know the difference between a regular duplicate and an exact duplicate so you know exactly what to remove.
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