Guides

How to Find and Delete Similar Photos on iPhone (2026)

Updated October 29, 2026 · Written for iOS 26

Take a photo of your kid blowing out candles and you probably took eight. Six of them are slightly blurry, one has someone's elbow in it, and one is the keeper. Multiply that by a few years and you have thousands of photos you'll never scroll back to.

Here's how to clear them out without losing the good one.

What the built-in Duplicates album does (and doesn't)

Since iOS 16, the Photos app has a Duplicates album. Open Photos, tap Collections, scroll down to Utilities and tap Duplicates.

It finds photos that are the same image: a picture you saved twice, the same file shared back to you in a group chat, or an edited copy. Tap Merge and it keeps the best quality version.

What it does not find are similar shots taken seconds apart. Those are different images as far as iOS is concerned, so they never show up there. For most people, that's where the real clutter is.

Option 1: Do it by hand in the Photos app

This works fine if you only have a few events to clean up.

1. Open Photos and go to the day you want to clean up.
2. Tap a photo and swipe through the shots from that moment. Decide which one you're keeping.
3. Go back, tap Select, and tap every shot except the keeper. You can drag across a row to select several at once.
4. Tap the trash icon and confirm.

The hard part isn't the deleting. It's finding the groups in the first place when your library has 20,000 photos.

Option 2: Clean up bursts

If you hold down the shutter, iOS saves a burst. Bursts show up as one photo, but every frame is stored.

Go to Collections > Media Types > Bursts. Open one, tap Select, tick the frames you like, tap Done and choose Keep Only Favorites. The rest go to Recently Deleted.

Option 3: Use an app that groups similar shots

An app can compare every photo with the ones taken around the same time and group the look-alikes. This is what Spareroll does. It reads your library on the phone itself, groups shots that look nearly the same, marks the sharpest one to keep, and lets you clear the rest in one go. Nothing is uploaded.

Whatever app you use for this, check two things first:

• Where are the photos analyzed? You want an app that does it on the phone. There's no reason for your photos to go to a server to find duplicates.
• What does it cost after the trial? A lot of cleaner apps start a weekly subscription after 3 days. If the price on the paywall says "/week", look elsewhere.

Picking the keeper

When you're choosing which shot to keep, look at these, in this order:

1. Eyes open, no blur on faces. Zoom in. Motion blur is easy to miss at full screen.
2. The one you already favorited or edited. You picked it once already.
3. Sharpest overall. If two look identical, keep the one with the higher resolution (swipe up on the photo to see details).

Don't forget the last step

Deleted photos stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days and still take up space. When you're done, go to Collections > Utilities > Recently Deleted, tap Select and Delete All. If you use iCloud Photos, this also frees your iCloud storage.