The curse of automatically multiplying photos

If I take a photo, whether it be on my iPhone or my camera, it duplicates on my iPad and iPhone once it’s synced to all my devices. I’ve tried all sorts of tweaks in settings and downloaded apps for my Mac to get rid of the doubled (even tripled) pictures, but the only way I can seem to get rid is to manually delete them one by one. Also, some of the pictures don’t give me a ‘trash can’ symbol to delete them, which is annoying. They don’t duplicate in iPhoto on my Mac. I’m worried – am I using storage for these extra pictures? Carl Spencer This happens because you’re importing pictures to iPhoto without deleting them from your iPhone afterwards. Then in iTunes, you also have the option to sync photos from iPhoto ticked. So every time your iPhone or iPad sync, it transfers a second copy of each photo. There’s no trash icon for these duplicates because they are part of the image library on your Mac and iPhoto is controlling this.

To remove the duplicates from your iPhone and iPad, tap Settings > Photos & Camera, and turn off My Photo Stream. This will warn you that the Photo Stream images will be deleted on your device; that’s fine because these images are still on your Mac. Now in iTunes on your Mac, select your device from the sidebar on the left and on the Photos tab, uncheck the box marked ‘Sync Photos from iPhoto’. Again, this will warn you about deleting images and, again, this is perfectly fine. Sync the device.

Now, you can turn back on photo syncing in iTunes, or Photo Stream on your device (but not both). In future when you sync new pictures across to iPhoto, delete them from the device’s Camera Roll afterwards. That way you’ll only have the copy synced or streamed from iPhoto.