Tame Your iPhone’s Photo Library With This Built-In Declutter Tool

There are many things you can do if you have some free time during the holidays, but one of the most rewarding might be cleaning your puffy clothes. iPhone photo library. All year round, we take photos of people and pets – as well as receipts and parking space numbers – which load the Photos app. A series of selections will help you regain storage space and delete shots you don’t need.

Before you give in and pay Apple for more iCloud storage, you should know that there’s a ridiculously simple solution already built into your phone. If you’re using iOS 16 or later, the Photos app has a magical little folder called Duplicates. It automatically collects all your identical and almost identical photos so that you can delete them in one go.

Instead of playing a painful spot-the-difference game, you can reclaim a huge chunk of space with just a few clicks. This is the simple solution that you probably overlooked.

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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 group them into an easy-to-find album in the Photos app. Apple says the iPhone classifies duplicates not only as exact copies, but also as photos that look identical but have unique resolutions, file formats, or other slight differences. This includes low-resolution versions you may have saved to share on social media or even bursts of almost identical photos taken at the same time.

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

1. Open it Pictures app on your iPhone.

2. In iOS 26, tap the Collections button. In earlier versions, go to the next step.

3. Scroll to Utilities section and press Duplicates. This is where you can view all the duplicate photos on your iPhone and delete them, individually or all at once.

4. If you want to remove all duplicates at once, tap the icon Select button, then press Select All. You can also delete them in groups of two or more: tap Select in the upper right corner, then press the button Select button to the right of the pairs.

5. Then tap Merge [number] to merge all duplicate photos detected by your iPhone and send them to the Trash.

If you want to remove duplicates individually, tap the icon Merge button that appears next to each pair. Then press Merge [number] Copies to remove duplicates. Go through the row and repeat this step for all identical photos you want to delete.

Merging keeps the best version of the photo in your library. Duplicates are moved to the Recently Deleted album.

If you found this iOS feature useful, check out this one from CNET accelerated guide to iOS 26 features And 18 Features You May Have Missed. For more tips on how to save space, read our full list of tips for clear your iPhone storage.