9/15/22
9:00 am

How To Detect Duplicate Photos With iOS 16

A new feature in iOS 16 for the iPhone allows you to see duplicates in your Photos library and delete or merge them. This same feature is coming to iPadOS 16 and also macOS Ventura.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can detect and delete duplicate photos in the Photos App on iOS 16.
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So a new feature in iOS 16 is the ability to see duplicate photos in the Photos App and then choose what to do with them, like merge them or delete one or the other. Here's how it works. First, Apple puts this function in the Album section. So you're going to go down to the bottom and tap on Album. You're going to see all your albums there. Shared Albums, People, Places, different things like that. Media Types and at the very bottom you're going to see Utilities. One of those utilities is Duplicates. It will show you the number of duplicates it has found right there. Now, if you don't see a Duplicates Folder there? The reason probably is you simply don't have any duplicates. The Photos app hasn't found any photos that qualify to being duplicates. Therefore no Duplicates Folder will be shown under Utilities. 
Now it finds them in the background. So this isn't something that works when you actually tap Duplicates. It's finding duplicates all the time. It may take some time if you have a large photo library and you've just updated to iOS 16 or maybe you've just added a lot of photos. So something happens in the background and it may take a little while after you add new photos or update. Also probably depends on how big your library is. Now when you tap on Duplicates then you're going to into this special album. It's a list of all the photos that have been found that the Photos App thinks are duplicates. So it is finding photos that are identical. They are exactly the same photo taken exactly the same time, exactly the same bits in the photo. But it is also finding photos that might differ in some ways. For instance a photo may be a different resolution. Like maybe you exported from Photos. Edited it and resized it in another app and brought it back into Photos. So now you have two identical photos but different resolutions. If may also find photos that are nearly identical. Maybe ones you took just one second after the other so they look extremely similar. 
So you can look through the list here. You can see I even have one that is there three times. So I can go through and browse through this like it is kind of an album and see the different duplicates. I can tap on one and then go down into the pair. I can swipe between them and see each one. I can also tap at the bottom to switch between them which does it without the animation between them so it may be a better way to see if they are actually identical or not.  Take a look at this last one here. It's actually two different photos. I just pointed the iPhone down at the ground under my desk and took two photos and they are extremely similar. It's hard to tell the difference. But if you look closely you can see that they actually were taken at different times. This, of course, is my special photo collection for making tutorials. But in my regular photos collection I actually have photos where there are people in them and you can see they are different photos. They are slight differences in the background or in the positions of people. It's very close but they are definitely not exactly the same photo. Still I may not want to have both photos in my library since they are so similar.
Now you can get rid of duplicate photos one of a few different ways. One way is just to go into the pair and go between them and then the one you want to delete you use the Trash Can or bin icon down here to get rid of it. Another thing you can do is just have the Merge button next to the date for the photo. If they're identical, well, it really doesn't matter which one is deleted. They're the same photo. So deleting one or the other is not going to make any difference. So what exactly does Merge mean then in that context? Well, it's not always about the photo because sometimes you've got data attached to the photo like, say, a caption or you might have key word tags and other information. When you use Merge you will preserve that. For instance, let's take a look at this one right here. Let's go in and you can see for the first one there's no caption there. But if I swipe over to the second one you can see there is a caption. So I created a caption and I didn't realize there was a duplicate. Now I have one without a caption and one with a caption. So the idea is by merging those two it's going to preserve that caption. It is going to make sure that the one and only one I have left has that caption. Let's try that. I'll tap Merge and merge the two items. Notice that now it disappears from the Duplicates Album because there is no longer a duplicate. There's only one of that photo. Now if I go to my library and find that photo and then I go and look at it I'll notice the caption was preserved. It's smart enough to make sure that caption now exists for that one and only copy of the photo. 
Now back in Duplicates what if I had two duplicate photos and each has a different caption. You could see here for the first photo I've got this caption. For the second photo I have a different caption. So let me merge these two photos and see what happens. I'll merge them. It disappears from here. Now when I go and find it in my library and take a look at the resulting photo. I can see it took both captions and it put them, one on one line and one on another. I didn't lose either caption. You could see here I've got a set of three and can merge all three of these together and here's two I've got. Notice the sizes for these two. They are different sizes. So one of them was taken out of Photos, resized and brought back in, but this Duplicates Album recognized them as the same photo even though one has been resized. Now if I merge these two what happens is it's going to be smart enough to take the higher resolution one. 
So merging isn't somehow merging the pixels from one photo to another. I've already seen people misunderstand it that way. It's only going to take one of the photos. It's not going to do any kind of weird magic to try to merge two different photos to combine them. It's just taking the highest resolution version of the two photos and then merging the data between them like captions.
Now here's another thing. If we go back here to Albums to the Utilities section there is Recently Deleted. If we go into Recently Deleted notice that when we merge photos one of them gets deleted. That deleted photo goes into Recently Deleted. So it's doing the right thing here. It's not getting rid of it and not allowing you any recourse to get it back. It's actually putting it here where it will sit there for 30 days. So if you did make a mistake in merging two photos that weren't the same or something like that then you can go to Recently Deleted and find it.
So this utility in Photos is actually doing exactly what I've suggested over the years every time somebody has asked me how do you get rid of duplicate photos. That's to compare your photo side-by-side. Figure out what's going on and delete the one that you don't want or if they are identical just delete either one. Don't let an automatic process just delete photos for you. Photos are too valuable to have an automatic process perhaps make a mistake. This utility puts those duplicates side-by-side rather than having you scroll through all of your photos. So it makes the process a little easier. It also makes it very easy to merge any data in case you did put a caption on one and some other data on another, you don't have to manually take care of that when getting rid of duplicates. 
Now the same feature is coming to macOS Ventura. So unless you only have an iPhone I would wait and do this process on your Mac where you have a bigger screen and it is easier to see what is going on and work with it using the Keyboard, or Trackpad, or Mouse. Since iCloud Photos works across all your devices it doesn't matter which one you do it on if you are using iCloud Photos. 
This won't get rid of the root problem of why you have duplicate photos. Maybe you just have a few created by a few simple mistakes over the years. But if you constantly have duplicate photos you have to figure out why. Maybe you're doing something like using both iCloud Photos but you're still connecting a cable and manually sneaking photos. Maybe you're overriding the duplicate detection when you import photos. Maybe you're using some sort of third party app to edit the photos and it is creating a copy every time it does that. It's important to figure out what's going on if duplicate photos are a persistent problem for you. Fix that problem or change your behavior so this doesn't become a common occurrence. But at least now when somebody does have existing duplicate photos instead of trying to figure out how to compare them and get rid of them there's an easy function inside the Photos App that they can go to to do that. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 20 Responses to “How To Detect Duplicate Photos With iOS 16”

Charles Bake

2 years ago

I had a chat session with Apple Support this week who acknowledged there are reports of this feature not appearing for some users (like me!). I was told it should be swept up in the next iOS update.

NANCY L

2 years ago

When you import, the date/time in metadata is the date/time imported. If you change the date and/or time to the correct date and /or time and then later import the exact photo but do not again modify the date/time, does this new feature see the 2 photos as the same picture with the merge option?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Nancy: I would image it would see them as duplicates. Why not try it and see?

Bern Shanfield

2 years ago

Per question on YouTube re dups in albums I found this on '9-5', per Apple: “Merging combines relevant data like captions, keywords, and favorites into one photo with the highest quality. Albums that contain merged duplicates are updated with the merged photo.”

It looks like deduping with not delete photos from albums.

I started spinning cases (multiple dups with different data in multiple albums) and this put my mind at ease.

Mike Fitzpatrick

2 years ago

Followed exactly as you said and i had 1070 duplicates. Merged them thinking space would be freed up on my phone, yet it went the other way increasing by 300Mb. Only me eh? Very useful though, thanks you.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Mike: Remember the other copies were sent to your Recently Deleted album. So they are still there for now.

Howard Brazee

2 years ago

It's interesting that PadOS doesn't appear to have this option.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Howard: iPadOS 16 hasn't been released yet.

Nancy Bishopp

2 years ago

Perfect explanation for this new deletion app - thank you for making iOS so much easier! Small question: when searching for dips in more than one folder or shared folders, will this method find all duplicates in each separate albums? Thanks, once again!

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Nancy: This method only looks at the entire Library. It doesn't look in just one folder/album/moment or anything else.

Jane Galbraith

2 years ago

If you delete a duplicate what happens to photos in albums? Maybe one would be in one album and the other would be in another?🤷🏼‍♀️ Or the same photo will be in more than one album.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Jane: If you have two photos that are duplicates, A and B, and A is in one album and B is another album, and you merged them, then you would have one photo after the merge and it would be listed with both albums A and B. Try it and see.

Jason Gold

2 years ago

Having scanned numerous old photos and manually inserted the correct location I wonder how location metadata will be handled in a merge. Will it show two different locations? I've set up an experiment but my library is so large that even after a few days the app has not finished scanning all of the photos! A good solution would be to include the latest modification.

Charlie B

2 years ago

What does Merge do when it sees a photo that has both a RAW and a jpeg version?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Charlie: Not sure. I'd imagine it either doesn't consider them duplicates, or if it does and lets you merge then it keeps the RAW. Try it and see.

Dale King

2 years ago

Is it true that if you have duplicates in Folder A and B, that you have no way of know which one is the original and if you delete the original, all of the duplicates of that picture will also be deleted? Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Dale: Folders? Do you mean albums? If you are using the "merge" from this feature then one copy is kept of the photo, and it will appear in both albums as you expect. But I'm not sure that is what you mean. If you have a duplicate, there is no "original" it is just two copies of the same thing. If you delete one copy using the regular delete function, not merge, then it deletes just that one copy. Maybe you are confusing real duplicate copies of a photo with just seeing it in more than one place? Please see https://macmost.com/think-you-have-duplicate-files-or-photos-maybe-not.html to understand this better and avoid making disastrous mistakes.

Dave

2 years ago

I have one another old and too cheap phone (android), since almost last 3-4 years, that has this feature. And there was no shout out of this feature like something special. When I saw first, just took it as a normal feature (like any other basic feature). Even I am great Apple fan, but seems too much hype of just a simple feature which already existed elsewhere silently.

Karen S

2 years ago

I just upgraded to Ventura yesterday and the people portion keeps saying: 0 photos scanned--46611 remaining. The duplicates say: "Finding Duplicates. Scanning will continue when you're not using the app." I know it takes a while, but what exactly does it mean when I'm "not using the app"? Is it "quit" out and closed down completely or is it open and minimized in the dock or in the background while I'm using another app? Also, how long do you think it will take for this scanning of people and mo

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Karen: Quit Photos. Then it will probably complete it while it is sleeping tonight.

Comments Closed.

How To Detect Duplicate Photos With iOS 16

Comments: 20 Responses to “How To Detect Duplicate Photos With iOS 16”

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