There are plenty of things you can do when you have some free time during the holidays, but one of the most rewarding may be clearing out your bloat. iPhone photo library. Throughout the year, we take photos of people and pets (and parking receipts and numbers) that load the Photos app. A round of purging will help you reclaim storage space and delete photos you don’t need.
Before you start paying Apple for more iCloud storage, 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 rounds up all your identical and near-identical recordings so you can delete them at once.
Instead of playing a painful game of spot-the-difference, you can reclaim a huge chunk of space with just a few taps. It’s the simple solution you’ve probably been ignoring.
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Delete duplicate photos and videos to get more storage space on your iPhone (iOS 26 shown here).
Apple introduced the “duplicate detection” feature in 2022, and it works exactly as the name suggests. The tool uses on-device AI to identify identical images and merge 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 the same but have unique resolutions, file formats or other minor differences. That includes lower-resolution versions you might have saved to share on social media or even series of nearly identical shots taken at the same time.
Here’s how to use the iPhone’s built-in tool to free up storage space:
1. Open the Photos app on your iPhone.
2. In iOS 26, tap the Collections knob. In previous versions, go to the next step.
3. Scroll down to the Utilities section and tap Duplicates. Here you can view all duplicate photos on your iPhone and delete them individually or at once.
4. To remove all duplicates at once, tap the Select and then tap Select All. You can also delete them in groups of two or more: Tap Select in the top right corner, then tap Select button to the right of the pairs.
5. Then tap To combine [number] to merge all duplicate photos that your iPhone detects and send them to Trash.
To delete duplicates individually, tap the To combine button that appears next to each pair. Then tap To combine [number] Copies to remove duplicates. Go ahead and repeat this step for all the identical photos you want to delete.
Merging preserves the best version of the photo in your library. The duplicates are moved to it Recently Deleted album.
If you found this iOS feature useful, check out CNET’s quick guide to iOS 26 features And 18 features you might have missed. For more advice on how to save space, read our full list of tips clearing your iPhone’s storage.
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