The iPhone Duplicates album versus a photo cleaner app

What the built in album does

On iOS 16 and later, open Photos > Albums, scroll to Utilities, and open Duplicates. iOS lists sets of exact duplicate photos and videos and offers a Merge button that keeps the highest quality version and combines the metadata.

It is free, it is first party, it needs no permission grant beyond the Photos app itself, and nothing about your library leaves the device. If you only want exact duplicates gone, this is the right tool and you should use it before installing anything.

Where it stops

Job	Photos app, Duplicates album	Nixly
Exact duplicate photos	Yes, free	Yes
Bursts and near identical shots	No, these are not duplicates to iOS	Yes, in a category of their own
Screenshots as their own group	Separate album, no size figures	Yes, with a measured total
Videos listed by file size	No such view	Yes, 50 MB and above, biggest first
Reclaimable bytes per group	Not shown	Shown for every group and category
Swipe review of the whole set	No	Yes
Video shrinking	No	Yes, with Nixly Pro
Price	Free, part of iOS	Free to scan and for 10 deletions, then a subscription

When you do not need Nixly

We would rather say this plainly than have you subscribe and feel sold to.

• Your duplicates are exact copies. Run the Duplicates album and you are done. It is free and it is very good at this.
• You only want screenshots gone. Photos > Albums > Media Types > Screenshots lets you select and delete in bulk without any app.
• Your storage problem is not photos. Check Settings > General > iPhone Storage first. If Messages or a video app is at the top of the list, no photo cleaner will help you.
• You already deleted plenty and nothing changed. Empty Recently Deleted. That is free too, and it is usually the whole answer.

When the app is worth it

The case for a cleaner is bursts and size figures. A camera roll built up over years is mostly near identical frames, and iOS does not treat those as duplicates because strictly they are not. Nixly groups them separately, compares only photos taken within 60 seconds of each other so unrelated pictures never end up together, marks the best frame to keep, and puts a measured byte total on each group so you can tell what is worth your attention.

The other half is knowing what you are actually going to get back. Nixly measures the real file size of every item it offers you and sums those into one figure, and it tells you that the figure only becomes free space once you empty Recently Deleted.

One thing both approaches share

Neither uploads anything. iOS does its duplicate detection on the device, and so does Nixly, using Apple's Photos and Vision frameworks. Nixly has no account, no server and no analytics code, and its App Store privacy label states Data Not Collected. If you are weighing up any cleaner, the five checks worth running apply to all of them.