How to Find and Remove Similar Photos on iPhone

Need to find similar and identical photos on your iPhone? The native Photos app is powerful, but it falls short when identifying similar photos that are not exact copies of each other. However, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with finding them manually.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to find similar photos on your iPhone, as well as identical ones, efficiently. We’ll use a completely free third-party app and native features on your iPhone that most users, and even guides, don’t talk about often (but actually work great for this purpose).

How to Find Identical Photos on iPhone

Before exploring how to find similar photos on your iPhone, we’ll first demonstrate how to find identical ones using the native Photos app. In Apple’s language, identical photos are “duplicates” or exact copies of the same image. They usually show up due to repeated downloads, file transfers, manual duplication, or saving the image more than once.

1. On your iPhone, open the Photos app and navigate to the Collections page.
2. Scroll down to the Utilities section and tap Duplicates. You’ll find all of your duplicate (or identical) photos are automatically grouped and sorted by date. At this point, you can also Merge duplicates into one image or delete photos individually.
   

How to Find Similar Photos on iPhone

In this section, we’ll demonstrate 2 reliable ways to find similar photos, whether they are exact duplicates or pictures that just look alike. Both methods are completely free and easy to do, but only the first method is truly automated–so we recommend starting with that.

1. Use a Cleaner App to Find Similar Photos on iPhone (Fastest Option)

The fastest and only automated way to find and clean up similar photos on your iPhone is by using a third-party app (the native Photos app just doesn’t have enough features). There are dozens you can choose from on the App Store, but we’ll be using an app called Clever Cleaner: AI Cleanup App for this demonstration.

It’s completely free and ad-free as of this writing, and its similar photo cleaning feature is extremely reliable. During our tests, we found that it was able to detect similar photos with reasonable variations (which is harder than it sounds), along with any exact duplicates in our library. We’ll show you exactly how it works in the guide below.

1. Download Clever Cleaner: AI Cleanup App from the App Store. 
2. Open Clever Cleaner, and when prompted, grant Full Access to your photo library (don’t worry, we tested it for safety!).
   
3. Open Clever Cleaner and select Similars from the bottom menu. On this page, you’ll see all of your duplicate and similar photos grouped in clusters. The Smart Cleanup button nukes everything at once, leaving one copy per group. But for more precision, you can tap a group of photos to review them manually (which we’ll demonstrate).
4. Upon selecting a group of photos, Clever Cleaner automatically chooses the “best copy” and marks the rest for deletion. Alternatively, you can manually choose which photos to keep. Once you’ve made your selection, tap the Move to Trash button. Then, tap the Moved to Trash dialog pop-up at the bottom of the screen (avoid the Empty Trash button).
   
5. Swipe right on the slider at the bottom of the screen to delete the photos.
6. Finally, tap Delete once more in the pop-up dialog to confirm the action.
   

After cleaning your similar and duplicate photos, we also recommend checking out Clever Cleaner’s other features while you’re at it. The app is designed to help eliminate all the different types of clutter that can accumulate on your device without you noticing (it happens to the best of us!), and it’s a good chance to free up a huge chunk of storage space in one sitting.

• Heavies: Clever Cleaner can compress your videos, which shrinks their file size with minimal effect on the visual quality. It can also sort your videos by size or date.
• Swipe: If you want to clean your library with more precision (but still faster than the native Photos app), Swipe mode allows you to review individual photos from an in-app monthly album, then use left and right swipes to keep or delete images.
• Screenshots: All screenshots from your library are compiled and organized by date, along with a handy file size indicator in their thumbnails. You can view how much storage your screenshots use up, as well as delete all of them with one tap.
• Lives: The Lives tool lets you convert all Live Photos in your library into high-quality still images, as well as remove all your Live Photos, in one go. You can also convert individual Live Photos.

2. Find Similar Photos on iPhone Through Native Photos App Features

Aside from the Duplicates feature, the Photos app has other useful features to help you find similar photos quickly. However, they are more context-dependent, and you need to use them manually. These features are most useful if you already have an idea of which photos are likely to have similars.

2.1 Use the Search Field

The Photos app has an intelligent Search tool that uses keywords to identify the photos you’re trying to find. For example, you can use dates, locations, contact names, and other identifiers to conveniently assemble all the photos that apply to those keywords.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically select the right photos for you, but it makes a manual search a lot easier. We’ll show you how to search for similar images on your iPhone using this feature.

1. Open the Photos app.
2. Tap the search icon (magnifying glass) in the bottom right corner of your screen.
3. In the text field that appears above your keyboard, type one or more keywords related to the photos you’re trying to find. As an example, we used the keywords “dog” and “sky”.
   

2.2 Rely on the Collections Tab

Another way to utilize the Photos app’s smart indexing capabilities is to review its auto-generated Collections. These are sets of photos that iOS automatically groups together based on specific factors (e.g., subject, location, type, etc.). Many of these Collections help make finding similar photos easier; however, you still need to look for them manually, unlike the Duplicates utility and Clever Cleaner.

• Media Types: This Collection automatically compiles different media into their own unique but logical categories, such as Selfies, Portrait, Bursts, Screen Recordings, RAW, and several more. If you took several selfies for the perfect post, for example, this is a great way to find them.
• People & Pets: If you have a lot of photos with the same people or animals, their faces are eventually recognized by iOS as familiar subjects. Depending on several factors (like whether the photos have been indexed), you can find similar photos taken with a recognized subject in this Collection. Do you have 10 identical photos of your cat (like me)? They might be here.
• Utilities: Aside from Duplicates, the Photos app has other utility categories like Receipts, Handwriting, Illustrations, QR Codes, Documents, and more. If you took multiple photos of papers or documents, you’ll find them here.
• Map: While also part of the Utilities category, the Map is uniquely helpful for finding identical photos that were taken in a specific location (e.g., photos of animals at a park or pictures with family at a beach).

Conclusion

In summary, here’s how to find similar and identical (or duplicate) photos on your iPhone:

• For exact duplicates, you can use the built-in Duplicates feature in the Photos app (Photos > Collections > Utilities).
• The only automated way to clean up similar (non-duplicate) photos on your iPhone is by using third-party apps, like Clever Cleaner.
• If you already have a good idea of which photos have similar copies, you can use other native features to find them manually. The Search feature identifies photos by keywords, while several Collections automatically group photos based on their context (e.g., Selfies).

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to completely avoid creating duplicate and similar photos on your iPhone. Instead, we recommend setting a cleanup routine to prevent your photo library from growing out of control.

If you’re hurting for storage space in general, we also have another guide on how to clean up your iPhone’s storage; not only do we cover more types of photo library clutter, but we also demonstrate how to eliminate other junk files that may potentially be taking up literal gigabytes of your storage space.

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