How to find similar photos on Android

If you have already run Files by Google's duplicate finder and your library is still full of near-identical shots, you have found the actual gap in what Android gives you for free.

There is no built-in similar-photo finder

Files by Google and Samsung's My Files both find duplicate files — see how to delete duplicate photos on Android for the steps. Neither has an equivalent feature for photos that merely look alike rather than being the same file. Six frames of your friend in front of a doorway are six separate files, and no built-in Android tool groups them for you.

This is a different problem from duplicates, not a stricter version of the same one — the distinction is explained in full here, worth reading if you are not sure which one you actually have.

What Google Photos does instead

Google Photos will sometimes group a burst into a stack automatically, and its Memories or library view occasionally surfaces "similar photos" prompts. This happens as part of its own backend processing, on its own schedule, for cases it is confident about. It is not something you can trigger, it does not cover your whole library in one pass, and it will not tell you when it is done. Treat it as a bonus, not a tool.

How to actually find similar photos

Since there is no free systematic option, this is where a dedicated app is doing real work rather than duplicating something already free. A similar-photo tool compares how photos look to each other rather than comparing the files byte for byte, and it takes into account that photos taken close together in time and location are more likely to belong to the same moment — which is what pulls a burst back into one group instead of scattering it across your library.

Slean runs this as a separate mode from duplicate detection, on the phone, using detection written for Slean rather than an off-the-shelf library. It groups the matches and shows each group full screen with the date, file size and file type, so choosing which frame to keep takes seconds instead of scrolling. The Android build does this exactly as the iPhone one does — it is a native Kotlin app, not a port.

What grouping can and cannot get right

Grouping is strongest where the volume is: a burst, a set of retakes, several attempts at one shot taken within a short span. It is less certain about two photos of the same view taken hours apart, or a heavily cropped version of an existing photo, because those depend on how much the content actually changed.

Which frame in a group is the one worth keeping — whose eyes are open, which is sharper, which one you actually like — is not something any tool computes. That decision stays yours. What grouping does is put the candidates next to each other so you make that call once per group instead of once per photo.

Videos are handled more loosely than photos in any similar-photo tool, since comparing a video means comparing a frame from it rather than the whole clip, and that makes video groups worth a closer look before deleting.

iPhone has the same gap for a different reason — Apple ships a Duplicates album but no similar-photo finder. The iPhone version of this page is here.