Since iPhones come with non-expandable onboard storage, many owners rely on iCloud cloud storage as a backup — that is, until they get the dreaded “your iCloud storage is full” message, which will occur no matter which great iPhone you own. Unfortunately, Apple only offers 5GB storage for free, after which you can sign up for 50GB for $1.29 per month or 200GB for $3.99 per month. The price jumps more than three times to $12.99 per month if you want to upgrade to 2TB of storage. Before taking this leap with your iPhone, like the new iPhone 14, you can see if you actually need the space by cleaning out your iCloud account and removing content you don’t need.

One of the biggest things to look out for is duplicate photos If you have multiple Apple devices, for example, an image can load to the cloud from all three devices. If you took several shots and forgot to delete the other less flattering ones that are almost identical, that also counts. Before iOS 16, you needed third-party software to find duplicates. But an update in the new iOS now makes it possible to do right from the Photos app.

Here's how to find and remove duplicate photos right from the iPhone.

1. Go to your Photo Album and click on Albums in the bottom menu.
2. Scroll down to Utilities, where you’ll find a folder called Duplicates. Select it.
3. The Duplicate photos will appear in date order, each with a Merge button. Tap this button to merge two or more photos into one. The feature will analyze the photos and intelligently retain the most detail and metadata, so you keep only the best version of the photo.
4. Go down the line repeating this step for all the duplicate photos you want to merge.
5. To merge batches of photos simultaneously, tap Select in the top right-hand corner of the screen, then scroll down the list and select all the photos you want to merge at once.
6. Then, tap Select again, then Select All in the top left-hand corner, then Merge at the bottom (you’ll see the number of photos that will be merged in parentheses beside the word Merge). You may be warned that only a selection of the total are exact copies while others are similar, at which point you can decide if you want to merge all or just the exact copies.
7. Tap Merge at the bottom and confirm.
8. Once you delete these duplicates, as long as you have iCloud Photos sync on, the duplicate photos will also be deleted from iCloud.

Cleaning out duplicate photos from your iPhone can prevent you from upgrading to a bigger iCloud plan when you don’t really need one and is just generally a great way to save space in your account. With the recent update to Apple Photos that lets you share photos with family automatically, families can view photos from everyone. But this can also lead to a lot of duplicates. So, cleaning out your iPhone of duplicate photos will benefit your iCloud backup as well. You’ll only keep the images you need and not several variations.