Merge Duplicate Photos on Mac With the Duplicates Album

Photos scans your library in the background for exact copies and near-identical shots, then gathers them in a Duplicates album so you can merge each set in a click. Merging keeps the best version of every photo, and once you empty Recently Deleted the space is genuinely yours again. You need macOS 13 Ventura or later.

Open the Duplicates album

1. Open Photos.
2. In the sidebar, scroll down to Utilities and click Duplicates.

Don't see it? Photos detects duplicates in a background scan that runs while the app is open and your Mac is otherwise idle — on a large library the album can take days to fill in, and it stays hidden until the scan actually finds something. Leave Photos running (plugged in helps) and check back later. The Duplicates album exists on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia; on older systems you'd need a third-party duplicate finder instead.

Merge each set — or all of them

1. Click a duplicate set to compare the versions. Photos shows the file type, size, and resolution under each thumbnail.
2. Click Merge 2 Items (the count matches the set) and confirm.
3. To clear a long backlog, select many sets at once — Edit → Select All works — and merge them in one go.

A merge keeps the highest-quality version of the photo and combines the relevant metadata from the copies — keywords, captions, favorites, album membership — onto the one that survives, so nothing you tagged disappears with a lower-quality duplicate. Exact copies merge with nothing to lose; for near-duplicates (same shot, different resolution or format), Photos keeps the best one, so glance at the comparison before you commit. Videos show up in the album too, and they're usually where the real gigabytes are.

Empty Recently Deleted to actually reclaim space

The discarded copies move to Recently Deleted, where they wait up to 30 days before Photos removes them for good. That waiting period is your undo: open Recently Deleted at the bottom of the sidebar (it unlocks with Touch ID or your password) and restore anything a merge got wrong. To recover the disk space now instead of in a month, click Delete All in the top-right corner and confirm. Even then, free space can take a little while to show up in Finder as macOS clears purgeable storage in the background.

If you empty Recently Deleted and then regret a merge, one deeper safety net remains: a Time Machine backup of your Photos library from before the cleanup. Without one, emptied means emptied.

What Photos counts as a duplicate

Exact copies are the obvious case — the same file imported twice, a re-downloaded attachment, a burst that got saved twice. But the album also catches near-duplicates: the same image at different resolutions, in different formats (a HEIC and a JPEG of one shot), or with different metadata. That's what makes it more trustworthy than eyeballing filenames, and it's also why the comparison view exists — for near-duplicates you're choosing to keep the best version, not two identical ones.

Using iCloud Photos? Merges sync everywhere

With iCloud Photos turned on, merging on your Mac removes the duplicate copies from your iPhone and iPad too, and trims your iCloud storage usage along with the local disk. It also means Recently Deleted is shared across your devices — emptying it anywhere empties it everywhere. So restore first, purge second, and if you're nervous, let the 30-day timer do the emptying for you.

Keep shrinking the library

Duplicates are one slice of a bloated Photos library. Oversized videos, a full Recently Deleted album, and the optimize-storage setting usually matter more — work through how to reduce your Photos library size next.