Keepworthy
Apple Photos already does part of this job.
The Duplicates album is free, it is built in, and it is where anyone should start. It finds copies of the same photo. The fourteen near-identical frames you shot of one moment are not copies, so it leaves them where they are. That gap is where Keepworthy works.
Use the Duplicates album first. It costs nothing.
Since iOS 16 it has lived in Photos, under Albums, in the Utilities section, and it merges what it finds. If that clears what was bothering you, stop there. You don't need this app or any other one.
One thing worth knowing: Apple doesn't publish what it counts as a duplicate. Its own support page says only that Photos “detects duplicate photos and videos in your photo library.” You'll see cleaner apps assert that it catches exact copies and nothing else. I looked for Apple saying that and couldn't find it on any of their pages, so I'm not going to repeat it.
What you can observe yourself is the shape of the result. A burst of fourteen frames comes back as fourteen separate photos, because those aren't duplicates of each other. And on a large library the album can take a while to fill, because Photos has to finish analyzing first. Apple has said that can take up to a few days, and it wants the phone on power and on Wi-Fi.
Where the line falls
Apple Photos
Free, built in
- Duplicates, found and merged. The Duplicates album does that job and has since iOS 16.
- Star ratings and keywords, new in iOS 27. You can rate a photo 1 to 5 and filter by it. Turn them on in Photos under your profile.
- Bursts are grouped, with hints. Photos keeps a burst together and puts a gray dot under the frames it suggests keeping. That's the one place Apple nominates a shot, and it doesn't say why.
- Smart albums. Screenshots, Selfies, Videos, Recently Deleted and the rest are already organized for you.
- Search that works. Date, place, text in the image, scenes. Genuinely good, and no third-party app comes close.
- Your library lives here. Everything else on this page is a visitor.
- It does not rank a pile of near-identical shots that are not copies.
- It does not flag a blurry photo, or one where somebody blinked.
- It does not group near-duplicate videos or compress anything.
Keepworthy
Free to clean up. Pro $19.99 once
- The near-duplicates Photos leaves alone. Fourteen shots of one moment get ranked best to worst, and the strongest one carries the reason: eyes open, sharper, good exposure.
- The frames it passed over say why. Short notes like blinking, blurry or tilted, so you can see the call without hunting for the difference.
- Blurry shots, screenshot piles, blank frames. Eight kinds of clutter, each on its own screen.
- Near-duplicate videos, played side by side. Lined up to the same second, so you judge the same instant on both.
- Compression that writes a copy. The original stays put, and the app measures how much the picture actually changed.
- It runs on the Mac too, with the same analysis and the same picks.
- It does not edit, share, sync, or replace anything in Photos.
Your photos never leave Photos.
Keepworthy doesn't make its own copy of your library, and there is no import step and no account. The albums it suggests are real Photos albums. Anything you clear goes to Recently Deleted in Photos, where it stays recoverable for 30 days. A compressed video is added to your library next to the original, carrying the original's date, location, favorite and hidden status, and it rejoins the same albums.
If you deleted Keepworthy tomorrow, your library would be exactly where you left it.
What iOS 27 changed, and what it didn't
Apple's Photos work in iOS 27 went into editing and organizing by hand. A faster generative Clean Up for removing objects, Extend, Reframe, slideshow customization, saving a frame out of a video, and the new star ratings and keywords. Nothing in iOS 26 or iOS 27 ranks a near-duplicate pile, flags a blurry shot, or adds anything to the Duplicates album, which reads the same way it did in iOS 16.
The star ratings are the interesting one, and they cut against a page like this in a way worth naming. Apple now ships a way to mark the keeper. It's manual, which is Apple's own framing: their guide says rank your photos. If you have the patience to rate a library by hand, you don't need a third-party app to rank it for you.
One naming trap. Apple's Clean Up and a storage cleanup are different things that share a word. Clean Up erases a stranger from the background of a photo. It frees no space at all.
Questions
Should I just use the Duplicates album?
Try it first, always. It's free, it's already on your phone, and it does its job well. The reason people go looking for something else is usually the same one: they run it on a 24,000-photo library, get back thirty duplicates, and the library still feels exactly as full. That's the album working correctly. Those thirty were the duplicates. The rest of the pile is near-identical shots, which is a different problem.
Why is the Duplicates album empty?
Usually because Photos hasn't finished analyzing the library yet. Apple says that can take up to a few days depending on the size of the library and what else the device is doing, and it wants the phone on power and on Wi-Fi. It's also worth checking a second device, because people report finding duplicates on an iPad or a Mac that the iPhone hadn't surfaced yet.
Does Keepworthy replace Apple Photos?
No, and it can't. It reads your library through Apple's own PhotoKit, writes back into it, and has no library of its own. Editing, sharing and iCloud sync all stay in Photos.
Does it upload my photos?
No. The analysis runs on your iPhone or Mac using Apple's on-device models, and there's no Keepworthy server or account. If you include iCloud media in a scan, the app downloads your own photos from your iCloud to look at them on the device. The privacy policy has the detail.
Other comparisons
Sources
- Apple, “Find and merge duplicate photos and videos on iPhone, iPad, or Mac.” Read 15 September 2026. It says Photos “detects duplicate photos and videos” and does not define what counts as one.
- Apple, “What's new in iOS 27,” whose Photos paragraph covers editing, shared albums and video frames, and no duplicate or cleanup feature.
- Apple, “Apply star ratings to photos and videos” and “Add keywords,” both new in iOS 27. You can filter by rating. You can't sort by it.
- Apple, “Use Apple Intelligence in Photos,” which is where Clean Up is documented.
Who wrote this. Bill Dirkes, of Dirkes Medical, PLLC. I built Keepworthy, so I have an interest in what you decide here. I've tried to write the page I wanted to read before I started building, which means Apple Photos gets credit for the parts it does better than anything else.
Prices and features change. This page was checked on 15 September 2026. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell me and I'll fix it.
Start with the Duplicates album. Come back for the rest.
Keepworthy is free to clean up, with no daily limits and no account.
