How to Find and Delete Duplicate Photos in iOS 16/17/18

New feature: iOS 16/17/18 find duplicate photos

One of the best parts of owning an iPhone is the great camera. It even can help us shoot ProRAW on iPhone, which gives us complete control over the editing process.

However, since it's easy to take super high-quality pictures with iPhone, we will keep pressing the shutter, causing the photo library to pile up with shots, including a large number of duplicate photos. These duplicate photos serve no purpose other than to take up space.

Can iPhone detect duplicate photos? In the past, the answer is No. But now, the answer is Yes. In iOS 16/17/18, there is a new feature called Duplicate Detection. The Photos app will automatically detect duplicate photos and videos in your library. It will organize all duplicates in one album called Duplicates for you to check. You can merge or delete duplicates to clean up your library as well as free up storage space.

How to find duplicate photos in iOS 16/17/18

As long as you have updated to iOS 16, your duplicate photos and videos will be stored in the Duplicates album. You can go to that album to find duplicate photos. However, the album will not appear immediately after updating to iOS 16. Your iPhone needs one or two days to go through the library to find all the duplicate photos and videos.

If a few days have passed and you still can’t find duplicate photos in iOS 16/17/18, you can go to this iOS 16 duplicate photos not showing guide to get the solution.

How to delete duplicate photos in iOS 16/17/18

Let’s see how to delete duplicate photos in iOS 16/17/18. When you go to the Duplicates album, you'll see duplicate photos in chronological order, with a Merge button next to each group. You can tap the Merge button to combine duplicate photo sets into one photo.

Merging will keep one version of the duplicate set, combining the highest quality and relevant data and moving the rest to Recently Deleted in case you want to recover any shots. Or you can simply choose the unwanted duplicates and tap the Trash icon to delete them.

Make a backup before deleting duplicate photos

The discarded duplicates will be moved to the Recently Deleted album in case you will need them one day. However, the deleted photos will disappear permanently after 30 days. If you want to keep those photos for a long time, then you can make a backup before deleting them.

AOMEI FoneBackup, one easy-to-use iOS data management tool can help you backup iPhone photos to computer, USB flash drive, external hard drive, etc.

● It will create an image file of your photos, which helps save storage space.
● You can recover backups to iPhone at any time and it will not erase any photo or any other data on the device.
● In addition, it also can help you transfer full-resolution photos from iPhone to PC and you can check or edit them on computer.

If you care about your photos and want to make a backup, you can click the download button below to get FooneTool to make it.

How to delete duplicate photos in iOS 16/17/18 - delete one photo

1. Go to Photos app > Tap Albums and find Duplicates below Utilities.

2. Find the duplicate photos you want to merge > Tap Merge button.

3. Tap Merge X Items on the pop-up message to confirm.

Or you can tap the Select button > choose the unwanted duplicate photo > tap Trash icon to detele it.

You can tap any of the duplicate photos and swipe left or right to see the other duplicates in the match. And you can tap the i icon to get more info about the photos.

How to delete duplicate photos in iOS 16 - several sets or all duplicate photos

1. Go to Duplicates album.

2. Tap Select button at the top of the screen.

3. Tap the duplicates you want to merge, or tap the Select button to select a set of duplicates, or tap Select All in the upper right corner to choose all duplicates.

4. After selecting the photos you want to merge, tap Merge (X) at the bottom.

5. Tap Merge X Items... to confirm. Then it will automatically merge the duplicates in seconds.

If you want to delete duplicate photos by yourself, you can tap the Trash icon in the bottom left corner to make it.

Final words

That’s all about “iOS 16 duplicate photos”. In iOS 16, iPhone will find all the duplicate photos and videos for you to check. You can choose to merge duplicates into one photo or delete the unwanted duplicates as per your needs.

It’s easy to find duplicate photos in iOS 16 and it’s possible to find duplicate photos on computer. You can use duplicate photo cleaner for PC to find and delete duplicate photos to free up space.  Methods in this post can also be applied to the newest iOS18.