Most of us will find ourselves rather overwhelmed by digital photos these days: The ease with which pictures can be snapped by and stored on a smartphone means we can collect dozens or even hundreds of them per day, most of which we’ll never see again (unless they pop up in some social media recap of the year).
The sheer volume of images we accumulate now, coupled with the frequency with which we switch between multiple devices and share pictures around with friends and family, means that duplicates can quickly appear. Before you know it, you’ve got seven copies of the same meme or the same school photo of your niece on your phone.
Duplicate photos don’t really serve any purpose, other than to take up space on your smartphone (and your cloud storage accounts). Fortunately, weeding them out isn’t too difficult, and there are ways to attempt the task on both Android and iOS that don’t take a huge amount of time or effort.
Finding duplicates on Android
Android phones differ in certain ways depending on their manufacturer, but most Android users are likely to be using Google Photos. You may not realize it, but Google Photos actually has duplicate detection built in: If you try and upload an image that’s exactly the same as an image already in your library, then it won’t be saved. (You can test this feature by copying an image on a computer, and then trying to upload both copies to Google Photos on the web.)
If you do spot photos that look identical in Google Photos, they’re probably just very similar, or set to different sizes. It’s also worth bearing in mind that while Google Photos won’t upload the same photo twice to the cloud, this doesn’t affect the images stored locally on your phone, so duplicates might creep in here. For example, you might have taken a photo and then sent it on through a messaging app, which would create its own backup…
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