When you take a photo, you will undoubtedly take several in a row. If you forget to clean them up afterwards, your library will be full of duplicate photos. You can easily combine these.
Since iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura, the Photos app for iPhone, iPad and Mac can automatically sort out duplicate photos and place them in a separate folder. This way you can easily clean them up and keep only the best ones by combining them.
Why combine?
Using artificial intelligence, Photos automatically matches duplicate photos and places them in the Duplicate folder. By opening this folder you can check and manage the images.
You can of course keep one of the parts and delete the rest, but it is best to combine them.
Combining leaves one photo that has the highest quality and contains important information from both duplicates. One duplicate photo will then automatically be moved to ‘Recently Deleted’.
Combine duplicate photos
- Open the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad
- Navigate to the ‘Albums’ tab
- Under ‘Other’, tap ‘Duplicate items’
- Select ‘Combine’ from the images found
On a Mac, you can do this by opening the Duplicate Items folder from the sidebar and tapping Merge X Items above the photos you find.
Of course, it may be that the software has not found duplicate photos, in which case you cannot combine them.