How to find similar photos on iPhone

If you searched this because the Duplicates album came back empty or nearly empty, that's expected. It isn't looking for what you're looking for.

A similar photo is a different photo — six frames of the same doorway, a retake because the first one was blurry, three attempts at a sunset. Duplicate photos and similar photos are not the same problem, and the iPhone only really solves the first one. This page is about the second.

What you can do manually, and what each one misses

None of these are a similar-photo finder. They're places where similar photos happen to end up next to each other, which is not the same thing but is better than nothing.

Browse by Months or Days

Open Photos and switch out of Years or All Photos into Months, or tap into a single day. Because the camera roll is sorted by capture time, near-identical shots taken seconds apart usually land next to each other on screen. Scrolling a single day after a wedding or a hike will surface a lot of the obvious repeats just by eye.

What it misses: anything not adjacent in time. A photo you retook two years later of the same view, or a screenshot re-saved after editing, won't be anywhere near its match. It also doesn't scale — scrolling day by day through a 20,000-photo library to catch every retake is not a real plan.

The Bursts album

1. 1Open Photos.
2. 2Go to Media Types (under Collections on iOS 18+, or the Albums tab on iOS 16–17).
3. 3Tap Bursts.
4. 4Open a burst and Photos shows every frame with the ones it picked as favourites marked. Pick your keeper and delete the rest from within the burst view.

This one genuinely works, for burst photos specifically. What it misses: anything that wasn't shot as a burst. If you took six separate photos by tapping the shutter six times, rather than holding it down, they never get grouped into a burst at all — they're just six ordinary photos sitting in your camera roll.

Recently Saved

Under Media Types (or the Albums tab), Recently Saved shows images saved into Photos from other apps — screenshots you kept, images from Messages, downloads from Safari. If you tend to save the same picture from a chat thread more than once, this is where the repeats surface.

What it misses: it's a recency window, not a similarity check, and it only covers photos that came in from outside the camera. Anything you actually shot with the camera isn't in there.

The systematic pass

The manual approaches work because similar photos are often close together — in time, in a burst, in a save history. They stop working the moment two similar photos aren't close together, which is common: a retake weeks later, a photo you both AirDropped and screenshotted, two attempts at the same landmark on different trips.

Slean's similar-photo mode compares how photos look across your whole library, not just what's adjacent on screen. Photos taken close together in time and place are more likely to be grouped, which is what pulls a burst back into one set — but it isn't limited to that, and it isn't limited to browsing order. Groups show full-screen with the date, file size and file type, and nothing is deleted until you choose it.

A reasonable order to do this in

Clear the Duplicates album first — it's fast and the decisions are free, since it only ever contains true copies. Then open Bursts and clear anything shot as a burst; it's already grouped for you. After that, a similar-photo scan catches what neither of those touched: retakes, separate attempts at the same shot, and anything saved more than once from outside the camera.

On an Android phone the gap is the same but the free tools are different: Files by Google finds duplicate files, and nothing built in groups near-identical shots. The Android version of this page is here.