Smartphones allow us to document our lives, one photo at a time. Unfortunately, online services and device syncing can lead to duplicate photos piling up on our photo libraries. In this article, you’ll learn how to remove duplicate photos from your iPhone library. In doing so, you’ll remove the clutter and save space.

1. Remove duplicate photos manually

If you don’t have a lot of photos on your iPhone, but you still want to remove duplicates, your best bet might be to delete the items manually.

To manually remove duplicate images;

1) Select Photos at the bottom to arrange your pictures in chronological order with the newest items at the bottom.

2) Hit Select at the top right of the screen and click on the photos you want to delete. Then click dustin icon to delete the selected photos.

If you accidentally delete the wrong photos, you can restore the photos, Because removed images are kept for up to 40 days and stored in the Recently Delete folder. 

2. Use the Gemini app to remove duplicates

In 2018, MacPaw (the company behind the Setapp software service for Mac) introduced the freemium Gemini Photos app for iOS. This iPhone app uses a smart machine learning algorithm to help you remove duplicate photos on your iPhone, plus photo clutter, including screenshots, pictures of text, and blurred shots.

You can use the Gemini Photos app to remove clutter. To take it further, you’ll need to make an in-app purchase of $1.99 per month or $11.99 per year. For $14.99, you can unlock all of the app features for the life of the product. New users can try all the Gemini Photos features free for three days.

The first time you start Gemini Photos, the app will scan your iPhone Photos library. When the scan completes, you’ll see two folders of photos: similar and clutter.

3. Similar photos

Under Similar photos, you’ll see images sorted by date with the newest items at the top of the screen. Like images are stacked on top of each other and denoted by a number. In the example below, there are four similar photos:

1) When you click on a stack of similar photos, you’ll see the Best Result image, which Gemini suggests is the best one in the series to keep. Scroll right to left to see the other pictures in the series, which are each checked automatically for deletion.

2) Select Delete to remove the photos selected. You’ll see a confirmation message pop-up noting that the photos selected will be deleted across all of your devices, assuming you’re using iCloud Photos.

3) If you find a picture(s) you don’t wish to delete, just uncheck them.

4) If you see a stack of images you don’t want to remove, click on the eye icon on the page. From now on, these photos won’t show up in the Gemini Photos app. Instead, you’ll find them under the Ignore List under the app’s menu screen.

5) Go back to the Similar page in the app to find other like photos to delete.