How to Merge or Delete Duplicate Photos on Your iPhone
Reading Time: 3 minutesThe Photos app can now find duplicates in your library, which you remove within seconds. We’ll teach you all about it here.
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:
- Open the Photos app and tap Albums.
- Scroll down and tap Duplicates under Utilities. All duplicates appear next to each other, along with their respective dates and sizes.
- To merge all duplicates, tap Select in the top-right corner.
- Then, choose Select All in the top left corner of your screen.
- Select Merge (X) at the bottom. This number indicates the set of duplicates that will be merged.
- Tap Merge X Copies or Merge X Exact Copies according to the prompt you get.
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 to Recently Deleted.
How to Only Merge a Set of Duplicates
On the other hand, you can choose to merge only a specific set of duplicates and leave the rest alone. To do that:
- Tap the Merge button next to the set of duplicates you want to merge.
- Select Merge X Copies or Merge X Exact Copies according to the prompt.
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 get Merge X Copies or Merge 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 and restart 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, make sure you know the difference between a regular duplicate and an exact duplicate so you know exactly what to remove.
Reference: https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-merge-duplicate-photos-on-iphone/
Ref: makeuseof