Stop Putting Off Cleaning Your iPhone’s Photo Library With This Easy Declutter Tool

When (not if) your iPhone begins to complain that it is short of storage space, the number one culprit is usually the photo application. Your photo library is undoubtedly thrilled with beautiful photos … and snapshots of receipts, parking space numbers, thrown selfies and pet photos.

Before yielding and paying Apple for more iCloud storage, you should know that there is a ridiculously easy correction already integrated into your phone. If you run iOS 16 or later, the Photos Application has a small magic backrest called “duplicates”. It automatically brings together all your identical and almost identical photos so that you can delete them at once.

Instead of playing a painful game of the difference, you can recover a huge part of the space with only a few taps. This is the simple solution that you have probably ignored.

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Apple presented its “Duplicate Detection” functionality in 2022, and it operates as its name suggests. The tool uses an AI available to identify the identical images and aggregate them in an album easy to find in the photo application. Apple says that the iPhone classifies duplicates not only as exact copies but also as photos that seem to be the same but have unique resolutions, file formats or other slight differences. This includes low-resolution versions that you may have saved to share on social networks or even bursts of almost identical plans taken at the same time.

Here is how to use the integrated iPhone tool to release the storage space:

1 and 1 Open it Photos Application on your iPhone.

2 In iOS 26, press the Collections button. In the previous versions, go to the next step.

3 and 3 Scroll down Public services section and type Lining. This is where you can display all the double photos on your iPhone and delete them, individually or at the same time.

4 If you want to delete all duplicates at a time, press the Select button, then press Select All. You can also delete them in groups of two or more: type Select In the upper right corner, then press the Select Button to the right of the pairs.

5 Then press Merge [number] To merge all the double photos that your iPhone detects and send them to the trash.

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

The merger retains the best version of the photo in your library. Duplicates are moved to the Recently Deleted album.

If you have found this iOS functionality useful, see the accelerated CNET guide on the iOS 26 features and 18 features that you may have missed. For more advice on how to save space, read our full list of tips to erase the storage of your iPhone.