Find duplicate photos on your iPhone and Mac

You could have dozens of copies of the same images in your Photos library, taking up space on your phone and in your iCloud account. Luckily, Apple offers an easy-to-use little tool that lets you find duplicate photos and delete the copies, all right from the Photos app.

These types of duplicate images can accumulate more quickly than you might expect. They arise if you make a copy of a photo to edit, if you screenshot a photo to bump it to the top of your Camera Roll, or if you and your partner both upload the same picture to your Shared iCloud Photo Library. In fact, I found hundreds of duplicates in my own carefully curated library.

It’s a surprisingly sophisticated feature that took Apple engineers a fair amount of smarts to cook up (more on that later). Here’s how to use Apple’s duplicate image remover and get rid of all those unnecessary files. Keep reading or watch our video instructions.

Find duplicate photos on iPhone, iPad and Mac

This feature has been available since iOS 16. But with the massive redesign of the Photos app in iOS 18, it’s a bit harder to find. The new design abandons standard tab bar navigation for a single continuously scrolling view.

Originally available at the bottom of the Albums tab, the Duplicates smart album is now at the bottom of the Photos app in the Utilities section. Here’s how it works.

Table of Contents: Find duplicate photos

1. Find Duplicates smart album in the Utilities section
2. Merge duplicate photos
3. Merge all duplicates at once
4. Find duplicate photos on your Mac
5. How Apple’s duplicate image detection works
6. More Photos features

Find Duplicates smart album in the Utilities section

First, open the Photos app and scroll down until you see the Utilities section. Swipe left on the list and tap on Duplicates. Once you’re there, you’ll be able to see all the duplicate photos it can find.

If you don’t see it, it could be that you don’t have any duplicates at all. Hooray!

Merge duplicate photos

If you do see some duplicates, just tap Merge to condense all the matching images down to one. You’ll see a small popup that says, “The selected items are exact copies that may have different metadata. Merging will keep one version of the duplicates that combines the highest quality and relevant data, and move the rest to Recently Deleted.”

Tap Merge X Exact Copies to delete the duplicates.

If it’s not completely confident that the pictures are exact copies, you’ll get a slightly different message: “Duplicates include both exact copies that may have different metadata, as well as photos that appear to be the same, but may have unique resolutions, file formats, or other slight differences.” You’ll be given the choice to Merge X Exact Copies Only, which will only merge exact matches; or to Merge Y Items which will merge everything you’ve selected.

In my experience, there were no false positives. Everything it wanted to merge was still merge-able. And it’ll always choose to keep the highest-quality version of a photo.

Whichever option you choose, you’ll be able to find the one original copy back in your Library tab; the duplicates will go to the bottom of Recently Deleted, and the set will disappear from the Duplicates page.

Merge all duplicates at once

If you have hundreds and hundreds of duplicates to merge, you might find that it’s really slow tapping Merge for every single pair. Luckily, there’s another option that can save you time.

Tap Select in the top-right corner. Then, tap Select All and tap Merge at the bottom of the screen.

Find duplicate photos on your Mac

Performing the same duplicate-destroying operation works much the same way on a Mac. First, open the Photos app on your Mac. You might need to wait for your Photo library to sync if you haven’t opened Photos.app in a while.

Once it loads, click the disclosure arrow to expand the Utilities section in the sidebar, then click Duplicates. Click Merge X Items above each section to delete the duplicates. You can also hit Command-A (⌘A) to select all items, then click Merge X Items.

How Apple’s duplicate image detection works

Duplicate detection was a nuanced computer science problem Apple engineers had to solve. I had the opportunity to speak with one of the engineers that worked on this feature at WWDC22.

You can’t just find duplicate photos using superficial data like file size or resolution — it needs to check if you have both a full-quality and a lower-quality copy of the same image. Plus, it needs to figure out if you’ve made edits to a copy of a photo, and determine which one you might want to keep.

The ability to delete duplicate photos was necessary for Apple to properly implement iCloud Shared Photo Library (a feature I fully recommend looking into for families and close friends). My wife and I turned on our shared library, but of course, both of our personal libraries were littered with the same pictures we sent to each other in the years before this feature.

With duplicate detection, I’m confident that our new unified library doesn’t contain 12 copies of that one picture of our dog we both like, or two full sets of all our wedding photos taking up space.

More Photos features

We originally published this article on how to find duplicate photos on January 25, 2023. We updated it on March 27, 2023 and April 3, 2025.